Fallout
by Aurora West
Summary: Life only seems to get more complicated for Taffyta Muttonfudge. Turbo's reappearance in her life was enough to handle, and now it seems like Sugar Rush isn't as popular as it used to be. Sequel to Terminal.
1. Chapter 1

Disclaimer: _Wreck-It Ralph_ is the property of the Walt Disney Company.

Author's note: This is the sequel to my story, 'Terminal.' 'Christmas in the Fungeon' takes place between 'Terminal' and 'Fallout', but it isn't necessary to read it. 'The King's Favorite' is also part of this universe, but again, isn't strictly necessary to read. No AUs here, as somehow _Ralph Breaks the Internet_ didn't touch any of my head canon. As far as I'm concerned, this all happened. ;)

Thanks for reading!

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CHAPTER 1

Taffyta could hear kart engines in the distance as she followed Sour Bill into the fungeon. Her fellow racers were warming up for a day of quarter alerts—victories and losses, a racer's fortunes rising and falling on the skill of the gamer who'd chosen them. High stakes, high drama—the best life in the arcade.

And here _she_ was, in the fungeon.

Taffyta wasn't on the roster today. Ever since _Sugar Rush_ had reset six months ago, the daily rosters had been decided by a randomizer, and _random_ was definitely the key part of that word. Sometimes she'd be on it for days, even a whole week, in a row, other times she'd go just as long without racing. The latter were the times she hated. Talk about the worst. If she wasn't racing, she wasn't happy. But at least she dealt with it better now than she had three months ago.

"It's not going to work, you know," Sour Bill informed her, his tone as flat as always.

"Thanks for the vote of confidence," Taffyta said. Like she needed further discouragement. Her stomach was already twisted so tightly that she hadn't been able to swallow a single spoonful of her strawberry soup and she'd even put _sprinkles_ on it, but even the smell of food had made her feel ill.

"Just being realistic—"

" _Thanks_ , Sour Bill," Taffyta snapped.

The sour ball shrugged unconcernedly and held out a key to her when they reached the bottom of the stairs. "President von Schweetz will see you in her office in ten minutes. She needs to be at the starting line—"

"When the arcade opens in half an hour, I _know_ , I'm a racer in this game too, in case you didn't notice?" When Sour Bill just continued holding the key out to her, she sighed sharply and snatched it away. "You don't have to stay."

But Bill was already on his way back up the stairs. "Wasn't planning on it," he droned.

Taffyta made a face at his back, forgetting her nervousness just for a second. Then it came crashing back down on her and she swallowed and clutched her hand around the key. Closing her eyes for a second, she turned around, drew in a deep breath, and marched down the fungeon corridor.

The door at the end of the corridor was the only closed one, and that was where she headed. "Good morning," she said as she stuck the key in the lock and turned it.

The door swung open, and Turbo was waiting for her, sitting on his strawberry wafer bed and kicking his heels against the floor. "Hi," he said. "I did some redecorating, like it?"

Taffyta glanced around the cell. Pointing to a glob of food dripping down the wall, she asked, "That?"

"What?" He looked startled and squinted at the food. "Oh, no, that's just from when I threw my breakfast at Sour Bill, I mean, if you can even _call_ it breakfast, honestly claiming that was food _has_ to be a violation of my human rights—"

By this time Taffyta had spotted what he was _actually_ talking about—she'd get back to him slinging his breakfast at Sour Bill in a second—and she squealed and clapped her hands. "You hung it up!"

Turbo smiled smugly and bounced to his feet, glitching in the middle of the movement so that he was King Candy by the time he was standing. When he'd first shown back up in her life, she hadn't been able to get used to the way he glitched back and forth, like he couldn't decide who he wanted to be. Now it seemed perfectly normal.

"'Coursthe I did," he said. "Right nextht to the window, in case I get tired of the view." He paused. "Which—hoohoo—I _did_ , about sixth months ago."

She moved to his side and looked up at the picture she'd painted for him, hanging in pride of place on the wall. It wasn't the only personal effect he had in his cell—Vanellope had eased up on him a little in the past three months—but the little smile on his face as he looked up at it made it obvious that it was special to him, and that made Taffyta glow.

The painting had taken her a whole month—mainly because she didn't know how to paint. But she'd always liked the paintings hanging in the castle, back when she'd hung out there all the time with him. Mostly they were landscapes, different locations in _Sugar Rush._ There'd been a portrait of him in one of the hallways, which had long since disappeared, though the spot was still slightly discolored, darker than the sugar cube walls around it. And, well, she'd thought he probably liked the landscapes too, especially after the reset, when it had become clear that nothing in the castle had been his to begin with. Except his self-portrait.

Actually she'd been wondering for awhile now where that had come from. And where it had gone, for that matter, though she kind of thought it might have gotten tossed into the hot springs in Diet Cola Mountain.

So she'd wanted to give him something. Snowanna was the most artistic person she knew, so Taffyta had gotten her to show her how to make the paint, and then for a month, a whole _month_ , she'd stood on the balcony that ran along the upstairs hallway of her house, and painted the view.

It wasn't _great_ or anything. But—at least you could get the general idea.

"Hopefully you'll get to see the real thing soon," Taffyta said.

He glanced down at her. "You _really_ think the glitch is going to let me out of here? She _likes_ having me locked up. Gives her something to gloat about."

"Vanellope," Taffyta said, the admonishment automatic by now. "And yeah. I mean…I hope so." This was going to be not the first, not the second, but the _third_ time the two of them had made this request. Each time Vanellope had said no, and that made Taffyta mad, and sad—she'd cried last time—but she got it. When you had your game stolen from you, got turned into a glitch, bullied and tormented and kept from doing the thing you knew you were supposed to be doing for fifteen years…well, Taffyta probably wouldn't be inclined to let the person who'd done that to her out of the fungeon either.

She smiled at him. "It's going to go better this time. You're…I mean, I think Vanellope's starting to…" She'd been about to say 'like you', but no, that was, well, really stupid. "…warm up to you."

"You _know_ you're a terrible liar, don't you? You should've just said third time's a charm. And by the way, the lie has to be _somewhat_ realistic, not complete fantasy."

"Fine, she's starting to believe me when I tell her you don't want to take over the game again."

A musing look came over his face.

She stuck her lower lip out in an exasperated pout, and King Candy snorted and nudged her shoulder. "Fine, but _starting_ to believe doesn't necesstharily translate to 'allow your sworn enemy to live freely in your game without supervision'."

"Am I seriously the only one that's going to be positive about this?" she grumbled.

"Blame Sour Bill. His negativity has a disproportionate effect on my normally bubbly persthonality, hoohoohoo."

Eyeing the food dripping down the wall, Taffyta said, "I think he has that effect on everyone." Then, looking at him, she asked, "You didn't _really_ throw your breakfast at him, did you?"

King Candy glitched back to Turbo. "I mean, the door was shut. It wasn't like I was actually going to _hit_ him."

She sighed. Maybe Sour Bill wouldn't mention that to Vanellope.

Smoothing her skirt and straightening her jacket, she took a deep breath, knowing they had to do this now if it was going to happen, and said, "Okay. Ready?"

He ran a hand through his dark hair. "Now or never, right?"

She opened the door to his cell. "That's what you said last time."

"Well, last time I'd been calling the palette swaps rank amateurs…not to their _faces_ , so you'd think the glitch wouldn't have cared."

"It wasn't very nice."

"The truth isn't always nice." Sticking his hands in his pockets as they made their way down the fungeon corridor and up the stairs, he added, " _You_ know they're not any good, you said it enough times before."

 _Before._ This was their shorthand for 'before the game reset', which was really a euphemism for, 'before Vanellope entered the Random Roster Race and King Candy was revealed as Turbo and got eaten by a cy-bug and killed in a jet of boiling diet cola'.

With a shrug, Taffyta said, "Well, yeah, they're… _not_ , but you still shouldn't say it to Vanellope."

Oreo guards were patrolling the hallways upstairs in the castle, and all of them stared at Taffyta and Turbo as the two of them walked by on their way to the throne room. Er, Vanellope's office. She was trying to get all of them to call it that, but so far it wasn't sticking.

Taffyta had gotten used to feeling like she was just as bad as him—people treated her differently when the two of them were together. And she could admit it to herself—sometimes, it was hard, and yeah sometimes, she didn't want to be stared at like she was evil. _Most_ of the time she wanted to shake the other racers and the NPCs by their shoulders and tell them to just give him a _chance_ , like Vanellope had given everyone in the game a second chance.

But sometimes… Sometimes she just didn't want to deal with it, didn't want to bring him out of the castle under her supervision. Sometimes she just wanted to live a normal, uncomplicated life.

Except she'd left 'uncomplicated' behind long ago. Like, long, _long_ ago, when she'd first become friends with King Candy, over a decade ago. You didn't just let go of something like that. When he'd been revealed as Turbo she'd tried though, really hard, because he was evil and had taken over their game and tried to kill Vanellope and how could she _like_ a person like that?

The thing was that he _wasn't_ evil, she knew that. She knew that he _couldn't_ have been because she'd seen the affection in his eyes for her, and the way he smiled at her. The bad things he'd done were bad but she couldn't forget the good things he'd done either.

Anyway she'd done bad things too, and people knew she was the ringleader of Vanellope's tormenters, and the arcade didn't treat her great. It had always been general knowledge that she'd been King Candy's pet, his favorite, but after the reset everyone outside _Sugar Rush_ had just assumed that the two of them had done nothing but think of ways to be mean to Vanellope all those years, when the truth was that Vanellope hadn't had anything to do with…well, _anything_.

No one got it. They thought King Candy had spent all his time trying to torture her or lock her up, and that Taffyta had driven around _Sugar Rush_ looking for the chance to pick on her. Vanellope had been nothing to them, and Taffyta knew how wrong that had been and _still_ felt guilty about it.

But that didn't change how things had been. Vanellope had been a nuisance, a minor annoyance, something to deal with if you _had_ to, and both of them had had better things to do.

What she'd done couldn't hold a candle to what _he'd_ done of course, but…well, Minty _had_ suggested that Taffyta should go to a Bad Anon meeting (and Taffyta had made sure to save all her power-ups in the next day's races to hit Minty with every single one. She hadn't won much, but it had been worth it to hear Minty screaming every time she spun out or was blown off the track).

When she'd told King Candy about it, angry tears prickling at her eyes, he'd grinned at her and said, "Well my dear, how about this—you don't lose any more racesth because of a personal vendetta, and I'll go to those Bad Anon meetings with you."

Which had just been… _not_ the response she'd been expecting, and it had made her laugh, and then it had made her think, and he'd been right. He was right a lot, which was another thing she knew about him that everyone else seemed to have forgotten. When you were wrong in such a big way, nothing else mattered. But he was _smart_ , and he knew how to race, and he knew how to rule a kingdom even if it was never meant to be his, and…

Yeah. Sometimes she didn't want to deal with it. Sometimes she wanted to go along with the popular opinion. But she couldn't. He was her best friend. And she'd stick by him _always_ , because if there was one thing she'd learned in the past six months, it was that you stuck by your friends. It was the worst feeling in the world if you thought they'd all abandoned you.

"Does your hair looks nice?" she asked him as they reached the throne room doors.

"Does _yours_?" he asked.

"Mine always does," she replied, flipping it, hoping the bravado would turn into actual bravery once she was in front of Vanellope.

Then, with a deep breath, Taffyta nodded to the guards on either side of the throne room doors. They knocked, received a, "Come on in, citizens!" and opened the doors wide.

Standing exposed in the doorway was enough to make Taffyta's heart pound. _Please please please_ please _let Vanellope say yes this time, make her realize he's not that bad…or at least that he's getting better…_

Vanellope was sitting on her desk, and when they entered, she jumped down and glitched over to them. "Hey, Taff," she said, then looked at Turbo and added in a much flatter tone, "Oh, you're still here?"

Taffyta was really proud of him for not responding with anything other than a tight smile. Granted, it was just about the least sincere smile ever, and it really more said _I hate you_ than _hi, nice to see you_ , but…small victories.

"Ready to race, Vanellope?" Taffyta asked, figuring she'd ease into this with casual conversation, even though all three of them were perfectly well aware of why they were here.

"You bet!" Vanellope grinned. "Too bad you're not on the roster today, 'cause I was really looking forward to paying you back for Chocolate Seashell Beach."

With a smirk, Taffyta said, "Well, guess you'll just have to wait for another chance, but I mean, that's assuming you ever have a shot of beating me again…" She batted her eyelashes innocently. "If it's any consolation, you looked really great holding that silver trophy."

"Aw, but I didn't think gold looked that good on you," Vanellope shot back playfully.

Out of the corner of her eye, Taffyta could see Turbo fidgeting, his fingertips glitching every so often as he drummed them on the sides of his legs. She'd given a lot of thought as to which guise he should appear in for this moment, the monarch who'd been cold and distant and unsympathetic or the grey-skinned racer that Vanellope had shrunk back from in fear as he'd tried to kill her.

But his original form was the stripped down truth of who he was—or who he'd _been_ , and in the end Taffyta had haltingly argued that if he could show Vanellope that he was different as _Turbo_ , then maybe she'd believe that he really had changed, down to his most basic 8-bit roots.

He'd looked at her, held out a hand and glitched it back and forth a few times, and said with a shrug, "If you think that'sth best. _I_ don't think she cares what I look like."

Yeah, Taffyta was probably over thinking things. But she couldn't _help_ thinking about things and how to make them better and how to make conditions perfectso that Vanellope couldn't say no. Of course, she knew all too well that no matter how hard you tried to make everything perfect, there were some things that would always be out of your control. And in the end Turbo was most definitely out of her control.

Taffyta cleared her throat. "So, um, Vanellope. I was wondering—that is, _Turbo_ and I were wondering if…maybe…since he's spent six months in the fungeon now and he saved the game and everything and didn't do anything to the code—"

That wasn't strictly true, since he'd altered Taffyta's own code to make sure the randomizer chose her not quite _randomly_ anymore, and she'd meant to mention that to Vanellope, really she had, she just kept…er, forgetting. "—Anyway, since he's been pretty…pretty nice, we were thinking maybe you'd let him live outside the castle?"

Vanellope's eyebrows were raised but her eyelids were lowered, an expression which Taffyta definitely recognized as her 'you've-gotta-be-kidding-me' look. She felt her heart drop into her stomach.

"Can't Turbutt talk for himself anymore?" Vanellope asked. "Usually he's got plenty to say."

Blinking in surprise—this wasn't a refusal!—Taffyta turned to look up at Turbo. His eyes were narrowed. She gave him a tiny, encouraging nod, praying that he'd be nice.

He glanced down at her and met her eyes, binary garbling them for a moment so that King Candy's brown-eyed gaze looked back at her. Then he returned his eyes to Vanellope. "Since I've been such an upstanding _citizen_ , Vanellope—"

"That's _President_ von Schweetz to you, chump," she interrupted.

His hands clenched into fists, and Taffyta watched him grit his teeth. She couldn't do anything but twist her hands together, hoping he wouldn't get angry.

" _President von Schweetz_ ," he said, his voice tight and a sneer just barely twisting at his lips, "I think it's about time you let me out of the fungeon. Don't you?"

Vanellope stared at him, looking unimpressed, and then looked at Taffyta. "Guess you're letting him write his own lines," Vanellope drawled.

Clasping her hands in front of her chest, Taffyta just said, "Please."

There was a long silence while the three of them stood there, Vanellope's hands jammed on her hips as she stared at Turbo. The roar of kart engines in the distance was coalescing towards one spot, and Taffyta knew by the sound alone that it was the starting line. This silence couldn't go on forever. Vanellope had to say something.

The president tapped one of her feet on the ground. "If I let you go," she said, and Taffyta's mouth dropped open as her heart soared, "where are you gonna go? Everyone's gonna know if you leave the game and _no one's_ gonna let you."

"He can come stay with me," Taffyta said quickly. Turbo glanced at her, looking surprised, and she smiled at him.

"Ugh," Vanellope said. "Bet he throws his dirty laundry on the floor."

Taffyta was tempted to say something else, plead their case more, but she had a feeling she'd said as much as she could. Vanellope knew everything about what Turbo had and hadn't done in the past three months, and there wasn't anything Taffyta could say now to change her mind—which had probably been made up before the two of them had ever set foot in the throne room. Office.

Crossing her arms over her chest, Vanellope said, "Well, if you think he's house-trained, Taffyta, I guess you can take him home."

Taffyta gaped, then stuttered, "R-really?"

"I don't _have_ to let him out if you don't want me to," Vanellope said.

Turbo glitched at her side and King Candy's hand came down on Taffyta's shoulder. "No no, she wantsth you to let me out."

With a squeal, Taffyta threw her arms around Vanellope, crying, "Thankyouthankyou _thankyou_ you won't regret it, you really won't, Vanellope!"

"Okay, okay, yeesh, Taff, calm down!" Vanellope pulled her goggles out of her pocket and snapped them over her eyes. "You better be moved out by the end of the day, Turbutt, or else I'm giving all your stuff to the Homeless Characters' Charity." She looked, for a second, like she wanted to say something, else, but instead she just turned around and glitched across the room and through the door that would take her down to the castle's kart garage.

The sound of a kart engine starting echoed through the castle, then faded as Vanellope zoomed out the garage doors and towards the stadium to await the day's first quarter alert.

Taffyta turned to King Candy, the grin on her face matching his. "So what do you say," he began. "Help me pack?"


	2. Chapter 2

CHAPTER 2

"We'll have to get a place for you to sleep, I just have the couch for now…or I guess you can sleep in my room if you want and _I'll_ take the couch, it doesn't really matter to me— _oh_ and I'll have to get some food that you like, I mean I know you like strawberry stuff _okay_ but that's pretty much all I have, and—"

"Taffyta, it's fine!" King Candy said with a chuckle, holding out his hands. "I'll sthleep on the couch for now. Till I get a place of my own. You know, all that empty land just waiting for a little homestead, I'm sure it won't take long to find something."

 _A place of my own._ She could see him, despite his words to the contrary, come to the same conclusion that she just had. _Sugar Rush_ was a big place, but the racers had it pretty well parceled out into their own territory, and no one was going to let him build a house in their spot. Oh well. They'd cross that bridge when they had to. For now she was happy to have him here.

It was weird seeing him in her living room. Even if he wasn't technically a king anymore, he still looked every inch the royalty he'd been to her for fifteen years. He still had the same presence that he always had. Even the fact that he was standing there with everything he owned in the whole world held in his arms didn't change that.

His eyes shifted to hers and he caught her staring at him, but instead of dropping her gaze she kept looking. "What?" he asked, raising an eyebrow.

"Just thinking," she said.

"Chocolate coin for your thoughtsth."

For a moment, she kept looking at him. Then she replied, "I don't think you've ever been here."

"No, well, why would I?" he asked breezily. "The whole game was mine, you know. And the castle." He hesitated. "I figured you wanted to explore. See thingsth you normally didn't get to."

Except she _did_ normally get to see them—with him she did, at least. That was something else she was having trouble getting used to, even after six months. She'd as good as been the princess of Sugar Rush, and now she was more like a prison guard for the man who'd given all of that to her. She wondered if he saw her that way too, and hoped not.

"Yeah," she said. "I did." Then, she shrugged. "I just…you don't seem out of place, is all. And I guess maybe I always thought you would." Taffyta hesitated for a moment, and then said in a rush, "You don't mind being here right? I mean you were king for fifteen years and this is…well it's a step down, actually it's a _lot_ of steps down, not that it's not nice but it's nice for _me_ and maybe it won't be nice for _you_ and—" And what was she afraid of exactly? That he was going to leave? Vanellope had made it abundantly clear that he wasn't _allowed_ to leave.

And not just Vanellope. Wreck-It Ralph, Fix-It Felix, Sergeant Calhoun, even monotone, boring old Surge Protector had shown a spark of feeling when the whole arcade, everyone who mattered at least, had gotten together and agreed that King Candy was under no circumstances allowed to leave _Sugar Rush_. There was no guarantee that he wouldn't game jump, didn't have plans to do something awful, like take over another game and hold it hostage and do… _something_ , though no one seemed too sure what that something was. There was a current of anger in the arcade these days, and an undercurrent of fear. Or at least, something that reminded her of fear, like the coppery scent of blood tendrilling out from an open wound in water.

His eyebrow stayed arched. "You do remember that _teensy_ little detail of how I've been living in the fungeon for the past half a year?" Glancing around, he said, "It probably doesn't seem like I much appreciate the hospitality of othersth, but Taffyta, trust me. Even if I'd come straight from the castle, this isn't a step down."

The hospitality comment made her mind flicker with questions for a second—hospitality like, how he'd come to be in _Sugar Rush_ in the first place, who he'd bribed and tricked and lied to. He'd never told her, she'd never asked. She wasn't sure either of them ever would.

And she wasn't sure it mattered. What could he possibly tell her at this point that would change how she felt about him?

"Well…" she said. "Well, good."

He looked around the room and then set down the box that he'd been holding. There was nothing in it except a few trinkets she'd brought to him during his stay in the fungeon—the painting she'd done for him of course, and settled at the bottom, his racing goggles and gloves. She wondered if he'd ever have any reason to wear them again.

Now _that_ was a depressing thought. King Candy, never racing again? No way. It was unthinkable. Which was exactly why she hadn't really thought it. Not exactly. Not so solidly.

She shook the thought away, though not before a new thought could flit through her mind— _how long before Vanellope lets him race?_ Yeah right, Taffyta—just deal with this first. One impossible thing at a time.

"So," King Candy said, as he glitched to Turbo. "Never had a roommate. What do you normally do for fun around here?"

"Well," she said, feeling strangely shy all of a sudden, "Pink Lightning needs a tune-up. I haven't raced since Friday. But don't you want to, like, get settled in?"

He glanced down and toed the box. "Oh, it'll take so long to unpack," he said sarcastically. His fingers flickered with binary. "I suppose we _could_ take a few minutes to look at your kart. You know, as long as it doesn't take too much time out of my busy schedule."

It was a joke, but at the same time it wasn't, and Taffyta's smile was forced. He saw it, too—she'd never been able to hide much from him. As he glitched back to King Candy, he said, "Taffyta—you know it'sth not you I'm mad at."

"I know, I know," she said quickly. "But I…I mean, I feel like I should be doing something, like…"

When she trailed off, he prompted, "Like what?"

"I don't know!" she said, feeling suddenly frustrated. " _Something_. This isn't what you want. All _this_?" She gestured to the room but both of them knew she meant more than that. "It's nice of you to say this is good enough but we both know it's _not_. You shouldn't be sleeping on my couch and helping me tune up _my_ kart, you should be…you should be…"

He was staring at her, waiting for her to finish. Waiting with a stillness that was unusual for him. Waiting for her to speak, she realized, in a way that wasn't unusual for him to wait for her to speak at all. Everyone else, he'd interrupt or talk over or his attention would wander to something he felt was more important. But he listened to her.

Taffyta gave a frustrated sigh. "You should be _racing,_ that's what you should be doing. You should be on the roster, racing _your_ kart, winning races—"

"All of them," he said, studying his fingernails.

" _Some_ of them," Taffyta said with a smirk. They met each other's eyes. "This is stupid," she said. "And it's not _fair._ "

Even though it really was. Considering who he was, and what he'd done, by most arcade residents' standards, King Candy had come out the other side of fair and was getting way more than he deserved. Vanellope had been generous. More than generous.

But suddenly it wasn't enough. Not for her, and especially not for him.

And then she thought of the arcade—of the anger and fear and outright hatred, and she wondered if they'd ever give him a chance.

The fight went out of her. Maybe it was the adrenaline from the morning finally wearing off. Quietly, she said, "Everyone else in the arcade thinks you're a liar at best and a sociopath at worst, and the rest see you as a _bad_ guy. But I know that there's more to you than that. 'Cause you can be really kind, and—and sweet, and, well, _good_. And I want everyone else to see that too. I want you to be able to do what you love."

King Candy didn't speak for another long moment, and she couldn't tell what he was thinking. Finally, he said, "You're very naïve."

Taffyta cracked a smile. "Hey, I'm a kid, what do you expect?"

"Taffyta, I—" Something made him stop, and he sighed. "My cynicism, I guessth. Sorry, Taffyta, sometimes I forget I'm an old man and you're most definitely not."

"You're not old."

"Might as well be."

"You're _not_ old," she insisted. When he opened his mouth to protest again, she said, " _Especially_ now that I know you're really—I mean…" She trailed off. Why was it still so awkward to just say who he _was_? Neither of them was comfortable with it. Funny thing was, he seemed almost more uncomfortable about it than she was. "How old were you supposed to be, anyway? In _Turbotime_?"

The question seemed to surprise him, and he furrowed his brow as he began, "I…hm. I never really thought about it. Wasn't exactly programmed with a lot of backstory, you know."

"You never knew how _old_ you were?"

"You know believe it or not, when you're a geezer like me from a game plugged in in the 80s—what's that thing they say? Age is just a number?" When she just kept watching him incredulously, he laughed and said, "Call it thirty-five, okay?"

She blinked and didn't say anything.

"What?"

"Well, it's just…" Taking a breath, she said, "I guess I just never realized that…well, you _are_ kind of old."

"And just—hoohoohoo—when I thought I wasn't right about anything anymore." He glitched red, held his Turbo form for a second, and looked down at his grey hands, before returning to King Candy. Then his face grew serious, and he fiddled with his bow tie with one hand as he said, "I'll try."

"Try?" she asked, confused.

He hesitated. "I'll try to not disappoint you. I'll try to…you know. Make sure that your faith in me isn't…misthplaced. Even though," he added quickly, "it probably is." Drawing a breath, he said, "I'll try to be nicer. To everyone. That'sth what you want, right?"

She wasn't going to run through all the reasons that she did, so all she said was, "Yes."

"Okay."

"Including Vanellope."

He rolled his eyes.

"You _have_ to be nicer to Vanellope. If you were, then maybe, I don't know, maybe she'll like, see how you really are, and maybe…then…" Taffyta trailed off as King Candy's eyebrows kept creeping steadily higher. "I didn't say you two were going to be best friends or anything," she muttered.

There was a pause, and then he put a hand on her shoulder. "I'll give being civil a shot, how about that? And then…you know." He shrugged. "We'll see."

She gave him a determined look. "You _are_ going to be a racer again."

Smiling at her, he said, "If you say so, my dear. If you say so."

* * *

Taffyta meant it. She did. But no matter how much she thought about it over the next few days, she couldn't find a way to make Vanellope see that allowing King Candy to race was the right thing to do. Actually, she couldn't even think of a way to approach Vanellope about it. And—well, that was because she knew what Vanellope would say. In fact she was pretty sure Vanellope wouldn't say _anything_ , she'd just walk away. Her president sure wasn't gonna listen to her list all the reasons that the man who had taken over her game and tried to delete her code should be let back on the track.

Still. It didn't mean she was going to stop thinking about it.

Four days later and she still hadn't come up with a solution, but she'd have the entire day to come up with it, since she wasn't racing. She spent the day puttering around her garage, doing routine work that her kart needed and some work that it didn't. When she'd polished it to its customary bright pink gleam, she walked slowly back into the house.

King Candy was pacing back and forth across her house, from the kitchen to the living room and back, like the caged Malteser Dogs that he'd kept in Sugar Rush Castle for a few months. That had been, oh, years ago now, when he'd talked about having a menagerie for all the racers to enjoy, back before he'd tried and failed to tame the Uni-candy-corn. Eventually he'd given up and let the Malteser Dogs go again—the Devil Dogs' howling had scared them, and Black Licorice Panthers had started prowling around the cage anyway. King Candy had wanted to catch them for the menagerie too, but they were too smart for the traps.

"Hey," she said, and he turned to face her. She wasn't sure if he hadn't known she was there, or if he had waited for her to say something just for the sake of waiting. "I was wondering if you wanted to go watch a few races," she said, before she could remind herself that this was probably the last thing he wanted to do. Still, watching a race counted as doing _something_ , which was way better than doing nothing and filling your hours with staring and pacing. It was the bulk of what he'd done for the past four days. Sure, Taffyta knew it was what he'd done in the fungeon—so it wasn't like he wasn't used to it—but it gave her the uncomfortable feeling that her house was just another prison to him.

Looking exaggeratedly at his wrist, he said, "Gee, I think I have an appointment coming up, here."

"Come on," she said. "It might be fun?"

The look he gave her suggested otherwise.

"It would do you good to get out of the house," she tried.

Crossing his arms over his chest, he replied, "You might—hoohoo—have a point about that."

She nodded firmly and took the remaining steps to his side, where she grabbed his hand. He didn't pull away, like she half-expected him to. "This is always the best time of day to watch a race," she said, "when all the schools let out, and the kids get here, and…" She trailed off, realizing that duh, of course, he knew all this. It was the time of day that all the top racers liked best, because the quarter alerts meant _good_ players. They'd all had their fair share of driving into walls, driving backwards, driving off cliffs and the edge of the road and out to the drop-off out at Chocolate Seashell Beach by this point in the day.

After a moment, he shrugged and nodded. "It's something to do. I sthuppose."

They walked all the way to the starting line. For a second, Taffyta considered suggesting that they take her kart. He'd fit on the back if he held on, and they would have got there way faster. But before the thought had even fully formed, she was rejecting it. King Candy, a passenger on someone else's kart? In the game that had been his? Or—at least the game they'd all thought was his.

No way. Never.

Luckily it wasn't too far. Strawberry Fields was in the start of the rolling hills just outside town and they got there quickly enough. The streets were empty, as usual. Most of the NPCs were in the stands, and Taffyta tried not to let her relief show. Whenever they'd encountered any of the other _Sugar Rush_ citizens during King Candy's field trips away from the fungeon, the screaming had been…well, kind of bad. The screaming and the running. And once someone had thrown nonpareils at them. At him, really, but they'd hit her, too, and that had been…it was just…well, mean. Everyone had been _mean_.

She guessed they both deserved it, but that didn't make it hurt any less.

As they passed through the empty streets, binary ran up and down King Candy's form. "Is it always this dead during arcade hours?"

Of course—he wouldn't know, because he'd so rarely not been on the roster. And when he hadn't been, he sure wasn't hanging around watching the rest of them race. "Pretty much," she answered. As they approached the stands, she spotted the concessions counter and asked, "Hey, do you want some lemon drops?"

He flipped a wrist in response, which she took as assent. Getting the box of lemon drops gave her an excuse to stall and prepare herself to deal with the screaming and possible stampede of NPCs fleeing from them.

These days, Beard Papa was manning the concessions stand. Vanellope had figured there wasn't much need for security at the kart factory anymore. And he slept on the job anyway. Probably wasn't getting as much shut-eye anymore—and as if to prove that point, when Taffyta stuck her head over the counter, Beard Papa was just settling back in his chair and letting his eyes droop shut.

They popped open when he saw her there, and he scanned her face before focusing on something behind her. That would be King Candy. So much for not freaking people out.

"I just want to get some lemon drops," she blurted out before he could say anything. When his eyes shifted back to her, she added, "While I—we—watch the race."

Beard Papa took his hand away from his belt. He'd been reaching for the walkie talkie that was no longer there. Taffyta's heart panged but she tried not to let it show on her face. "I don't have to serve you," Beard Papa said grumpily. "Don't see why I should. Game-jumping creep. Nice girl like you shouldn't be involved with him."

Taffyta tried not to glare. She'd learned this—the _last_ thing you wanted was to let them see that they were getting to you. At first she'd been really proud of herself for coming up with this coping mechanism on her own. Then she remembered. She'd seen it before. It was how Vanellope had dealt with her—dealt with all of them—while King Candy had been running _Sugar Rush_.

After that, she wasn't quite as impressed with herself. "Can I just have some lemon drops?"

Grumbling something unintelligible, Beard Papa reached into a bin and scooped a carton full of lemon drops, then pushed them across the counter towards her. "Here."

Taffyta snatched it and turned around. Before she rejoined King Candy, though, she shot over her shoulder, "You didn't think King Candy was a game-stealing creep back when you were hanging those 'No Glitches Allowed' signs all over the kart factory." Without giving him a chance to respond—which didn't work at all, because he yelled something at her back—she headed to the stairs that led into the stands.

King Candy was already standing there, arms crossed over his chest, eyebrows raised. "That went well."

She didn't answer, just stomped up the stairs, one or two lemon drops bouncing out of the carton.

The NPCs in the assorted fans section reacted predictably to the appearance of King Candy. Well, Turbo, by the time they got there, not that anyone stuck around to see him glitch between forms. His hands were still flickering red as they sat down in the now-empty stands. Something occurred to her for the first time—were they visible to the gamers, sitting there? And if they were, what would they think?

Another thought occurred to her. Did the gamers miss King Candy? Did they even notice he was gone? She glanced at Turbo out of the corner of her eye, watching as he balanced a lemon drop on his knee, then flicked it away. It clattered down the empty bleachers.

Neither of them said anything. Taffyta was having a hard time remembering why she'd thought this would be a good idea. She needed to make this better. She needed to—to—to _act_ like everything was fine, and then it would _be_ fine. Fake it till you make it. Like smiling even when you were sad. If you forced yourself to do it long enough then eventually you'd be smiling for real and not faking it anymore, and you'd cheer yourself up.

Taffyta looked up at the jumbotron, flipping between camera angles on Candy Cane Forest. What a snoozefest. The gamer had selected Jubileena, who was maintaining a steady fifth place. Good thing the gamers couldn't see the faces of the avatars they'd selected because Jubileena did _not_ look happy.

"There's only one person playing right now," Turbo said, breaking the silence.

"So? That happens all the time."

"Yeah, but not at this time of day. All the kids just got out from school, they're normally _lined up_ to play _Sugar Rush_! But I don't see a line, do you?"

Taffyta looked over her shoulder and up at the screen. He was right—she couldn't see a line. Glancing back at him, she asked, "How do you know that?"

He popped a lemon drop into his mouth, glitching back to King Candy mid-toss. "Because it was my job to notice these things. I'm king. Er, well, was. _Wasth_ king," he amended at the look she shot him. He raised an eyebrow at her. "You know, why is it that everyone loved me, but as soon as the _glitch_ took over, everything good that I ever did got tossed right out the window?"

She took a lemon drop from the bowl sitting between them. "Is that a serious question that you want an answer to?"

"Sure."

"You usurped the game and locked up our memories. That's kind of the first thing people remember."

He looked wounded. "But I was a good king! For fifteen years! _Fifteen years_ I took care of this game, I never let you kids get into trouble out in Game Central Station, I kept the NPCs happy, we were _never_ out of order for more than a day—"

"You tried to delete our princess and lied to us," Taffyta pointed out. He shut his mouth, and she sighed. "No, look, _I_ know that you did good things for us. And I'm trying to get other people to see that too. Or at least, not see _only_ the bad things." She hesitated, then said, "I think Candlehead might be coming around."

His face fell. "Candlehead? Great."

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"She'll come around on anything if you repeat it to her enough times."

"That's because she's _nice_ ," Taffyta said huffily. "I thought you _liked_ Candlehead."

King Candy smirked and opened his mouth to respond, then closed it as the jumbotron flashed and NPCs cheered. The gamer had managed to finish fourth with Jubileena. A mediocre race. That really _was_ unusual at this time. The older kids, the ones who were really good, didn't get fourth place.

Leaning forward and resting his elbows on his knees, he said, "I do. Like Candlehead, I mean. She's fine."

"You do?" a voice squealed from behind them.

Taffyta and King Candy both twisted around to see Candlehead standing there beaming. Behind her, Rancis was shuffling his feet, looking decidedly less happy to be there.

"I thought maybe you didn't," Candlehead went on brightly, "because of…well, you being Turbo." Rancis flinched when she said this, and King Candy's form flickered while his face twitched. "What are you two doing? Watching races? I don't think they were very good today—none of us were racing. Not that you can race anymore, King Candy—or wait, should I be calling you Turbo? Taffyta, what did you say to call him?"

"The etiquette of being a glitch," King Candy sighed.

"That's what we used to call Vanellope! Only—" Candlehead's expression dimmed. "—only, it wasn't nice that we did that."

"We did it because of him," Rancis muttered.

King Candy glanced at him, the set of his eyebrows somewhere between annoyed and resigned, but he only responded to Candlehead, saying, "The irony—hoohoo—isn't lost on me."

"Um," Candlehead said. Her cheerfulness was fading. Glancing at Taffyta, she asked, "So…was it fun? Watching?"

Before King Candy could answer, Taffyta said, "Not really. Watching isn't the same."

"Yeah." Candlehead twisted a strand of green hair around her finger. "Sometimes I don't like how the roster is random now, you know? I liked racing every day!" She grinned at this, and Taffyta caught a glint of what made her friend so lethal on the track in that smile.

"Vanellope just wants to make it fair," Rancis said, still sounding like this was the last place he wanted to be. At that, King Candy snorted—quietly, but loud enough for all three of them to hear. Rancis bristled. "I guess you have a problem with that?"

Binary ran up his arms and Taffyta held her breath. This moment had become tense enough without him turning to Turbo in the middle of it. His eyes flashed yellow for a second, but he held his form, then raised an eyebrow. " _Fair_ is in the eye of the beholder. I didn't hear you complaining when you were placing in the Random Roster Race every day."

Rancis turned red. "Yeah, well," he spluttered. "If I'd known what you… _who_ you were, and what you did—" He took a deep breath and stood as tall as he could. "I don't know why Vanellope let you stay, but you better show more respect."

"Oh?" King Candy said, looking amused. "You've become her knight in shining armor then, have you? That lumbering oaf Ralph has competition!" This last part was accompanied by a mean laugh, and Taffyta felt herself shrinking. Of course she knew that her friends wouldn't—couldn't— get along, not anymore. Not now that they all knew who King Candy really was.

"I'm just looking out for her!" Rancis snapped, his fists clenched at his sides. He wouldn't throw a punch, would he? For a second, Taffyta stared at him. That would be…well, that would be _really_ stupid. Not that King Candy was much bigger than any of them—a few inches, at most—but Vanellope had let slip a few times what had gone on during that fateful Random Roster Race. How he'd attacked her. It was just another thing to make her stomach twist with discomfort. Taffyta had never seen him violent. Honestly, she could barely picture it. But Vanellope didn't have any reason to lie. Which meant that Rancis, if he started a fight, wouldn't have much of a chance.

Maybe Rancis was remembering the same thing, or maybe he just realized that starting a fistfight was a terrible idea. Either way, he just made an exasperated noise, then said, "Whatever. I'm going over to Candy Cane Forest. Candlehead, Taff? You want to come?"

"Yeah!" Candlehead exclaimed, leaving Taffyta to stand there awkwardly, hemming and hawing, while Rancis looked unsurprised and even more unimpressed.

"Maybe tomorrow," she finally said, trying to sound as if this moment wasn't supremely uncomfortable. At this response, Rancis looked contemptuous. It reminded her, with a stab, of the months just after the game had changed—er, that is, returned to normal, and Vanellope had taken her rightful place, and Taffyta had been a pariah. She didn't know what else to say, though, so she didn't say anything, turning a fixed smile on Candlehead as Rancis turned and walked away, heading for his kart.

Candlehead looked uncomfortable. "Um, so, I guess I'll see you tomorrow, Taffyta," she said. The fixed smile still on her face—her cheeks were starting to hurt—Taffyta just nodded, and Candlehead hesitated for another second before following Rancis.

Then, unexpectedly, she turned around. "Bye, King Candy. Maybe you could come racing with us sometime, too."

King Candy stared at her, then his mouth twitched into a smile. It was genuine and bitter and sad all at the same time, all wrapped up in him not wanting to show any of that. "Maybe."

With that, Candlehead hurried to her kart, and once she'd revved it and sped off, Taffyta and King Candy were left alone in the stands. Even most of the NPCs had left. She finally let the forced smile fall off her face, and her shoulders sagged. Why in the world had she ever thought any of this would work? What was she going to do?

But then, surprising her, King Candy looked at her, the expression on his face just a little less bitter than it had been. "Well," he said, "it wasn't great, but it's a start, don't you think?"

For a second, she just stared at him, but then, she smiled too.

She'd figure this out. She was Taffyta Muttonfudge, and he was King Candy. Well, he was Turbo, but it all came to the same thing. And the thing was…well.

The thing was, Taffyta and King Candy, they didn't give up.


	3. Chapter 3

CHAPTER 3

Taffyta couldn't pretend to be anything other than overjoyed to be on the roster the next day. There was nothing, _nothing_ in the arcade like being behind the wheel of your kart, holding your foot down on the pedal and shifting through the gears. As Pink Lightning hugged tight mountain corners and slippery ice roads like they'd been built for her, Taffyta felt each revolution of the engine thrum through her, like it was powering her. Or maybe the other way around, because being out on the track was when she really felt _alive_.

The players still chose Vanellope most of the time. The novelty hadn't worn off, Taffyta guessed. But getting selected more took the sting out of it a little, and she'd even heard some of the gamers exclaiming that she was their favorite. Even if it was a shadow of her old popularity, it still felt good.

This race was an easy one. An unusual choice for so late in the day, actually. The arcade was only open for another hour, and normally it was intermediate and difficult tracks from the afternoon on. Chocolate Town Square was a piece of cake, and as she rolled up to the starting line, she shot Vanellope a thumbs up. Royal Raceway and Chocolate Town Square shared the same starting line, and she remembered with a twinge the days of the Random Roster Race. No randomizer selecting the next day's racers. Just cold, hard skill. She missed it. Even if, she reminded herself, it was more fair this way. Because this way everyone got a chance to race.

Right.

Though she had to admit, it _did_ seem more fair these days, because she was getting selected a lot more. She didn't want to say anything out loud to anyone, in case someone else noticed that the algorithm (King Candy had taught her that word, explaining that that was how the randomizer worked. Not that it made her understand any better, but she felt proud of herself for knowing a coding word) was choosing her slightly more than maybe pure chance would call for. She didn't want anyone going in the code vault and investigating the part of her code that made her more appealing to the randomizer.

The sound of karts revving filled the air as a floating marshmallow drifted into view, holding the traffic signal. Taffyta flexed her fingers and wrapped them around Pink Lightning's steering wheel. Vanellope had been selected by the young boy playing, and Taffyta had no doubt that she was going to smoke everyone and claim another gold for the day.

She tapped her foot on the accelerator, feeling the hum of the engine, and put her hand on the gear stick as the traffic signal turned from red to yellow.

Then the breathless eternity between yellow and green. She never breathed in those endless moments, only inhaling a full lungful of air as the light turned green and she jammed her foot down on the gas as she shifted into gear.

She shot out into the lead, hearing someone peel out behind her from an inexpert start. Glancing in the mirror, she saw it was Vanellope, who didn't look happy at all.

With a grin, Taffyta turned her attention to the race. Jubileena and Rancis both zoomed by her as they screamed through the town square that the track was named for, past the fountain spouting rainbow water and the cheering NPCs. The track curved, taking a different route than the Royal Raceway, and chocolate brick buildings flashed by on either side of the road before they emerged on the other side of the town.

She hit the boost pad just before the bridge over Hot Cocoa Creek and got airborne, her tires biting into the paved track again just in front of Rancis. Second place. Jubileena was only a few kart lengths in front of her, and the three of them burst through the power-ups at the entrance to Lollipop Meadow at almost the same time, Taffyta nudging her wheel just enough so that she'd grab her own power-up, rather than missing it in the second that it took to regenerate after Jubileena got it.

They neared the starting line for the second lap, still bunched together. Rancis was close enough behind her that she could see him punch his power-up button. Sprinkle Spikes spewed out behind his kart. Lucky—for her, not so much for Rancis.

Taffyta, on the other hand, had gotten a Sugar Rush, and she was going to wait for the opportune time to use it.

A Sticky Slick spat out from Jubileena's kart and Taffyta swerved around it, afraid for a second that she'd caught her front tire in it. She needed some distance!

There was a yell behind her as Rancis's attempt to dodge the Sticky Slick failed, and his kart got mired in it. With a smirk, Taffyta turned hard into the track's sharpest curve, staying as close to the inside as possible. So did Jubileena.

Taffyta managed to sneak a quick glance at the progress board as she sped by it. Everyone else, Vanellope included, were way behind. It was just her, Jubileena, and Rancis out in front. She wished she hadn't gotten that Sugar Rush on the first lap, but she needed it to pull off what she wanted to. She'd just have to rely on pure skill to keep herself in the race long enough to use it.

Lap two didn't change anything. Rancis got an A La Mode power-up and Jubileena got another Sticky Slick—which made her shout something definitely not E-Rated—but all of them avoided getting taken out by each other's weapons. That was fine. Taffyta would take status quo for now.

Lollipop Meadow was treacherous on the second lap, littered with Sticky Slicks and Sprinkle Spikes, and two melting mounds of ice cream from A La Modes. One of them had definitely been plowed into by another hapless racer. Rancis miscalculated as he went around one of the shapeless scoops, taking the turn too wide and putting more distance between himself and Taffyta in second place.

She allowed a satisfied smile to creep onto her face, but there was no way she was going to get complacent. The third lap began and Jubileena and Taffyta, practically neck and neck, raced through the town square. Taffyta cut so close to the fountain that droplets of rainbow water splattered her visor, which she reached up and swiped away.

She shifted as she took a corner hard, hoping that the drift would give her an edge over Jubileena. No such luck, though. Gooey gumdrops, Jubileena was _really_ driving well tonight.

The other girl shot a cocky grin over her shoulder and yelled, "You're not going to catch me, Taff!"

"Oh yeah?" Taffyta shouted back, as they emerged from the town into Lollipop Meadow. The bridge was fast approaching and Taffyta nudged the wheel until she was in line with the boost pad. Two hundred feet, one hundred feet, fifty—

When she was a kart-length from the pad, she punched her power-up button. The super speed of the Sugar Rush rocketed through her kart at the same time she hit the boost pad, and Taffyta wrenched the steering wheel hard to the left as she crossed the bridge. At its highest point, her kart went airborne, already in the flight trajectory that would take her through the air, across Lollipop Meadow, and to the final stretch of the track.

Taffyta glanced down at Jubileena, hunched low over the wheel of her kart as she tore around the meadow. She'd never catch up. This jump cut out way too much of the track.

With a grin, Taffyta braced herself for landing, revving her engine and shifting as the kart bounced back down on the ground. She shot off, holding her foot down on the pedal and urging as much speed out of Pink Lightning as she could get. It was a great shortcut, but it meant she missed the power-ups. And Jubileena hadn't.

The stands were _so close_ and the electronic banner of the finish line was flashing. Taffyta concentrated on it, pressing herself back into her seat. There was a flash of movement in her side mirror, and she shrieked, "Pixie sticks!" A sweet seeker cannon had just popped up from the front of Jubileena's kart. No way, she had _not_ been in striking distance for most of this race only to get taken out on the final stretch.

She heard the muffled _whump_ of the Sweet Seeker firing, and she was _so close—_

"C'mon c'mon _c'mon_ ," she muttered, her teeth clenched, her fingers tight around the steering wheel, and her foot aching from holding it down on the gas.

Inches from the finish line, the Sweet Seeker slammed into her.

But it didn't matter. She crossed the finish line, her kart careening end-over-end. Taffyta laughed as her stomach did somersaults, and in another half second, Pink Lightning slammed into the stands, crumpling instantly around her.

There was a sharp smell of burning sugar from her kart, and Taffyta realized she couldn't move. Something wet was running down the side of her face and into her mouth. Blood. So much that her head was probably cut wide open. Her right leg was twisted at a horrible angle, and when she saw it, the pain hit her, knife blades slicing her open from the inside out. Pure agony, and she almost opened her mouth to scream.

But it only lasted for a moment before regeneration kicked in. Taffyta almost liked the bumps and bruises of crashing better. Well, no, okay, so she didn't like massive head trauma and compound-fracture femur breaks, but regeneration was the _worst._ The familiar, unsettling feeling of her bits and bytes being taken apart tore through her, and even if it was only the tiniest fraction of a second, that moment of nonexistence made her want to scream.

Then she was standing by her pristine kart again, the only indication that she'd been dead the lingering pins and needles pricking at every part of her body on the underside of her skin.

Jubileena was hopping out of her kart, looking disgusted. "Nice wipeout," she said grudgingly.

"Yeah," Taffyta said, pushing down the weird jumping feeling in her throat that she always got after regenerating. "Thanks a lot. I haven't had one _that_ bad in a long time."

Sticking her tongue out, Jubileena said, "You got first place, so sorry, not sorry."

Rancis had finished only moments behind Jubileena, and he was already waiting at the winners' stand, waiting to be awarded his bronze trophy. He wouldn't meet Taffyta's eyes as she approached with Jubileena, and Taffyta felt something clench in her. So he was still mad about yesterday's encounter with King Candy. Whatever. He could be a sour patch kid if he wanted to, but she wasn't going to let it take away from her win.

She'd done pretty well today. Seventy-six golds, nineteen silvers, three bronze, and then the races that she'd been player controlled, which—well, none of which had been very good, actually. In one of them, she'd actually come in _dead last._ It was mortifying, and she felt her face grow hot at the memory.

In fact, now that she thought about it, she hadn't placed in _any_ of those races. Something niggled at her, something vaguely discomfiting about that, but she shrugged and went to accept her gold trophy, smiling smugly. The gamers wouldn't see the trophies get awarded, since Vanellope had placed outside the top three.

She glanced up into the stands as the trophy floated into her hands, and for a second, her smile faltered. King Candy was sitting there—alone, of course—watching her. Plastering the smile back on her face, she wondered why he'd come. Hadn't he said he wasn't going to watch today? His expression made something in her crack open a little.

Her friend looked completely and utterly miserable, and it took all the joy out of her win. She wanted to go straight into the stands to talk to him, but the arcade closed soon, and she knew gamers would be lined up to race. There wouldn't be time before the next quarter alert.

The three of them hopped down, Taffyta and Jubileena talking about the day's races while Rancis stalked off to his kart. Vanellope strolled over, glancing over her shoulder at Rancis. "What was that all about?" she asked.

Taffyta tried to look casual and like she _totally_ didn't care. "I don't know," she said, waving a hand breezily. "He's probably just a sore loser."

With a glance into the stands, Vanellope said, "If you say so, Taff."

This time, it was a real struggle to keep her smile on her face. Had Rancis said something to Vanellope about what had happened yesterday? Even though nothing really _had_ happened, it had just been an uncomfortable moment. One of the long series of uncomfortable moments that her life had become.

Luckily, the conversation stopped at that, and as the other racers wandered up, it turned to what they were going to do when the arcade closed. Jubileena wanted to try to get an invite to Pac-Man and Ms. Pac-Man's anniversary party, which Swizzle scoffed at and said, "No way, they _never_ have anything good to eat at any of their parties, just fruit."

"And pretzels," Torvald pointed out, at which Swizz just rolled his eyes.

"Yeah, unless they're covered in chocolate, big deal," Crumbelina said with a sniff. " _I_ want to go to _DDR_ , they just got upgraded with some new songs."

"Upgraded?" Citrusella asked. "I didn't know games could get _upgraded_."

"Maybe _Sugar Rush_ will get upgraded and make you a better racer," Jubileena laughed.

"Hey!" Vanellope said sharply.

Jubileena laughed again. "Just kidding." But Citrusella still looked hurt, and Taffyta felt bad that she'd started to snicker too. It probably wasn't very nice, but Citrusella definitely wasn't in the same tier as…well, her. Of course, Jubileena wasn't really either, so it was kind of the licorice calling the jelly bean black, as far as Taffyta was concerned. But the randomizer had chosen three re-colors today—Sticky, along with Citrusella and Torvald—and that was a high proportion of racers who, if you were going to be really, totally honest, just weren't much of a challenge to race against.

Rancis, who had been silent, suddenly spoke up. "Hey, shouldn't we have had another quarter alert by now?"

The racers' chatter abruptly halted as all of them realized it had been at least ten minutes since the last race ended. Taffyta glanced up at the screen, seeing the back of the Start screen, scrolling through tracks and demos. Forgetting that she was mad at Rancis, she said, "Yeah, the arcade closes soon. We _never_ have to wait to race at this time."

No one said a word, and Taffyta couldn't help but glance back at King Candy. Turbo, now. He'd glitched to his other form at some point, and he was leaning back against the bleacher behind him, his arms spread on either side of him. She couldn't see the look on his face but something told her it wasn't surprised.

"Maybe the arcade closed early tonight?" Jubileena said, not really sounding like she believed it.

"Maybe," Rancis said. Then, in a surer tone, he repeated, "Yeah, maybe. That has to be it. Private event, or something. Right, Vanellope?"

"Psh." Vanellope laughed. "I don't know what all you guys are worried about!"

Gloyd pulled his helmet off. "We're not _worried_. It's just weird."

Doing the same, Crumbelina said, "I wish we knew for sure. Then I could just go to _DDR_ now."

Taffyta glanced back towards Turbo again, then at her fellow racers. They were deep in conversation about what the best thing to do was, with Vanellope insisting that they couldn't just _leave_ , not when they didn't know for sure if the arcade was closed. There'd been a time when she would have been right in the middle of it too, but now she took the opportunity to slip away.

Clambering up on the stands, she said to Turbo, "I used your shortcut."

The miserable look on his face brightened somewhat, happiness flashing through his yellow eyes. "Did you? That's a tricky shortcut for an easy track, you have to go into the turn just right before you get that air, but then you always were good on jumps."

"Thanks," she said, feeling a glow radiate out from her center at the praise. Then, she sat down next to him, listening for a quarter alert with one ear, even while she somehow knew that another one wasn't going to come. "I didn't think you'd come today."

Turbo shrugged, his eyes dimming back down to a sour simmer. "There's nothing else to do."

He had a point. The conversation she'd had with him the previous day came back to her with crystal clear focus, about asking Vanellope if he'd ever be allowed to race again. She'd been too wrapped up in her own joy in racing to think about it. The realization made her squirm with guilt.

"The NPCs didn't scream as much today," he said, staring out at the track. "At least, I don't think they did. It was kind of hard to tell, since most of them ran away."

"Um," Taffyta said in response. All of her good mood from winning the previous race was shriveling up, between the weird lull in the game and Turbo's misery. She should have said something to Vanellope today. Well, no, there wasn't any time during arcade hours. She should have been _planning_ what to say to Vanellope, then, once the arcade closed. But she hadn't thought about it at all today, had she? "I'm still going to talk to Vanellope about you racing."

Binary flickered from the crown of his helmet down to his red sneakers. "Don't bother."

"Hey!" She punched her fist lightly against his shoulder, and the contact surprised him enough that he glitched. The binary traveled through him to her hand and through the rest of her body, and she let out a squeak and jumped back.

"Sthorry," King Candy said, looking contrite. "That's like a serious invasion of privacy, I guess. Or it should be, if it isn't."

"What, seeing my code?" she asked, holding her hand out and staring at it, as though it was going to dissolve into ones and zeroes in front of her. It didn't. It _never_ did, but it was hard to get used to the feeling of glitching on contact. "You've already seen it in the code vault, anyway. I wouldn't _be_ here if not for you."

After staring at her for a second, he looked away with a shrug. "Hoohoo, I owed you. You know, all that business of trying to delete your princess and lying to you." He raised an eyebrow at her. "The glitch isn't going to let me race, Taffyta. She just let me out of the fungeon. I know you're ambitious—one of your best qualities, don't get me wrong—but _that_ request's probably a little _too_ ambitious."

"Yeah, well—" But then she stopped and looked up at the screen far above them. A conversation was audible, and she strained to make out what was being said.

"—playing that one anymore, it's not the same."

"What are you talking about? It's literally the same as it's always been. That's the problem, it's boring."

"Nah, look at the racers for today! Their stats suck. Only like half of them are any good, it's like something…"

But she never found out what it was like, because the voices faded into the muffled background noise of the arcade, and no matter how hard she tried, Taffyta couldn't hear the rest of it. She glanced at King Candy, who just raised an eyebrow at her. "Interesthting," he said.

Taffyta didn't think it was interesting. Not at all. She thought it was really, _really_ …well, scary. Gamers had walked by the cabinet talking about—about—well, it sure had _seemed_ like what they were saying was that _Sugar Rush_ wasn't worth playing. "They said the racers today had bad stats," she said in a small voice.

"I'm _quite_ certain they weren't talking about you."

With a pout, Taffyta said, "Obviously. I know who they were talking about, I've just never heard any of the gamers say anything like that."

King Candy looked out over the track for a long time, watching the eight racers milling around the starting line, waiting for the next quarter alert. There was a sharp, considering glint in his eyes. Several of the racers glanced their way, but only Rancis's gaze lingered. It was too far for Taffyta to see his expression. Vanellope's glance was quick—enough to show she was watching, but not long enough to act like it bothered her.

For the first time, Taffyta wondered if it _did_ bother Vanellope that King Candy was her best friend. Could it? She had always just assumed…well, that Vanellope was busy enough being president, and one of the best racers in the game, and with her friends from _Fix-It Felix Jr_ , especially Wreck-It Ralph.

She shook the thought away, not wanting to think too much about _another_ reason for Vanellope to dislike King Candy, when she already had a bucketload of really good ones.

The clock in the town square struck nine o'clock, and that meant the arcade was officially closed. They'd gone a full forty-five minutes with no quarter alert, and Taffyta literally couldn't remember the last time that had happened.

"You know it's because of the randomizer, right?" King Candy asked her nonchalantly. "President von Glitch's great democratic plan just means that racers who don't deserve their roster spot are taking one up. Would _you_ want to race as Sticky or Torvald?"

Taffyta plonked her elbows on her knees and rested her chin in her hands. "Vanellope," she corrected half-heartedly. And then, "No," she admitted forlornly. She had a feeling he was right. Great. That made _two_ unpleasant conversations with Vanellope that Taffyta really, _really_ wasn't looking forward to. And while the first one only concerned King Candy's well-being, the second's scope was quite a bit wider. Game-wide wider.

With a sigh, Taffyta resigned herself to talking Vanellope into reinstituting the Random Roster Race.


	4. Chapter 4

CHAPTER 4

"See, I was just thinking, if he's racing he's happy, and if he's happy, he's less likely to take over the game—wait no, not that I think he's going to take over the game, but—"

Oh, _fudge_ , it was all wrong. Taffyta made a frustrated noise and flopped back against the wall of the castle. Sugar dust stuck to her sleeves and she brushed at them roughly, but most of it stayed stuck. The lemon drop sun felt hotter than usual today, which she knew was stupid, because the weather never changed in _Sugar Rush_.

 _Okay, let's like, try this again._

She stood up straight, breathed out, and centered herself. "He's really miserable, and I think if he could race, then he won't do anything he'd regret—argh!" She turned around the kicked the wall, which just hurt her foot, which made her hop around like an idiot clutching it before she almost lost her balance and fell over. The sun still felt too hot.

Taffyta drew in a deep breath and tried to calm down, pulling a lollipop out of her pocket and sticking it in her mouth. Then, she looked up. The back of the castle loomed above her, sparkling pure white in the sun. The castle was built into a hill, with a steep slope in the back, and it was a place that she'd staked out many times over the years to perfect whatever difficult conversation she wanted to have. There hadn't been _many_ with King Candy, but sometimes she'd wanted to ask him for something that she thought he'd say no to. A shortcut that only he knew, or a secret passageway. Nothing, in retrospect, that was very scary at all.

She was pretty sure she was at the same level as the fungeon. There were small, barred windows set into the wall not too high above her head, and she wondered which one had been King Candy's. The last thing she wanted to do was to blurt out something idiotic that would make Vanellope think he had designs on the game again. The president might lock him up again.

The request to let King Candy live outside the castle now seemed like it had been easy as pie. Why had she been scared about that? _This_ was scary. In the fungeon he hadn't even really had the ability to live a real life. It was just waiting around. But now he _did_ , and she needed to convince Vanellope to let him race again. She didn't think she'd ever forgive herself if she couldn't.

It had been two weeks since he'd been released, and his mood hadn't improved much. He was definitely glad to be out of the fungeon, but that was about all you could say. At least he was a good house guest. He cleaned up after himself, he was quiet. He didn't stay out late, not that he had anywhere to stay out late _at_. There was an unofficial ban on him going to Game Central Station. Every game in the arcade had an alarm on it programmed to sound if he tried entering, and Vanellope had insisted that it get installed at the exit to _Sugar Rush_ once she'd allowed King Candy to have supervised excursions outside the fungeon.

She wiped at her forehead. It was so _hot_. Oh, who was she kidding? She knew it wasn't really that it was any hotter, just that she was nervous, and it was making her sweat. Gross. Taking a deep breath, she glanced towards the path that would take her back up the hill to the front gates of the castle. Kart engines grumbled in the distance and with another breath, she started up the path, knowing that she hadn't figured out how to word this request yet but hoping something would magically come to her in the moment.

Yeah, that would work. Faced with Vanellope she'd be totally eloquent and articulate and her argument would be…just…like really, really great.

Climbing up the hill, she started to feel confident that this was actually going to work. Sure. She was smart, she was really charming, she was—"

"ARGH!" Taffyta shrieked as she stepped onto the road and a kart almost ran her down.

Vanellope swerved in a cloud of sugar and cocoa dust and came to a stop on the other side of the road. "Whoa, Taffyta! Are you trying to come up with new obstacles for the tracks or something?" She pushed her goggles up onto her forehead, her hair sticking up in all directions, and leaned an arm on her steering wheel. "I like the entrepreneurial spirit but I think we can probably come up with something a little less lethal."

Her hand over her heart while it raced, Taffyta squeaked, "Yeah. Probably."

Jumping out of the kart and tossing her helmet onto the seat, Vanellope asked, "So what brings you to Chateau von Schweetz?"

Taffyta made herself breathe normally. "Can we go inside? I uh, I wanted to talk to you about something." Oh no, oh no, no no, this was not a good start. She'd already stammered once, she was _not_ oozing confidence and charm.

Luckily, Vanellope didn't seem to notice her nervousness. "Yeah, sure," she said. "I'm starving, anyway. Want some cake? Ralph brought it over."

" _Ralph_ bakes cakes?" Taffyta blurted, unable to keep the incredulity out of her tone. Dumb move, maybe—Vanellope might think she was making fun of Ralph.

But Vanellope exploded with laughter. "Ralph baking! That's a good one. Nah, Mary bakes them. She's one of the Nicelanders, you know?" Taffyta did, but only vaguely, having never actually talked to one. She'd only seen them in passing. "I keep telling Ralph he doesn't have to bring them. Because we live here, you know? But he does anyway, and actually, Mary's a pretty good baker!"

In the throne room—er, office—Vanellope glitched over to her desk, opened a drawer, and pulled out a rainbow layer cake. "Here," she said, thrusting a piece towards Taffyta.

For a second, Taffyta just stared at it, her stomach feeling far too shriveled to possibly accept a single crumb of this. "Um, Vanellope," she said.

"Oh! Hey, I almost forgot, you're on the roster tomorrow. Didn't see you down at the Royal Raceway starting line so if everyone tells you the same thing that's totally on you for skipping class."

Even this news, which normally would have thrilled her, didn't do anything to loosen the pit in her stomach or the chokehold that her nerves had on her throat. Had she actually been feeling confident about this less than five minutes ago? Maybe she needed psychiatric help because her emotions were definitely yo-yoing.

"So, what didja want to talk about?" Vanellope asked around the huge mouthful of cake that she'd just shoveled into her mouth.

Everything seemed to come into sharp, crystalline focus suddenly, and it reminded Taffyta of nothing so much as the moments just after she'd swallowed a poison-bright green powder in _Extreme EZ Living 2._ That sparkling clarity had given way to the virus that had nearly killed her and _Sugar Rush_. Perversely, she almost hoped, just for a second, that something really bad might happen right now to get her out of this conversation.

 _Come_ on, _Taffyta. You came here. Grow_ up. _You can do this._

She missed the way the throne room used to look. All the different shades of pink, everything sparkling and regal. There was nothing wrong with the green that Vanellope had redecorated with, but it wasn't the same. Though Vanellope wouldn't want it to look regal, Taffyta guessed. Was green presidential? She didn't know any other presidents, or any other game that even had one, for that matter, and—

She was stalling. Vanellope was staring. Taffyta took a deep breath. Held it. Let it out. Then, finally, she said in a rush, "I think you need to let King Candy race again."

There was such a long silence that Taffyta was starting to wonder if she only _thought_ she'd opened her mouth and spoken, but then Vanellope said, "Excuse me?"

Licking her lips, which suddenly felt very dry, Taffyta repeated, "I think you need to let King Candy race again. He…he's really unhappy."

Vanellope's face had gone from smiling to slack to betrayed so fast and totally that it was hard to remember that they'd been having a pleasant conversation a minute ago. "You're kidding me, right?" she asked, though it was obvious from her tone that she knew Taffyta definitely wasn't. "Hardy har har, Taff, good joke and everything, but how about you cut it out and tell me what you really want to talk about?"

With a hard swallow, Taffyta said, "That _is_ what I wanted to talk about."

A few crumbs fell from Vanellope's lips, and she reached up and wiped at her mouth with her sleeve. "Well, I don't wanna talk about it." Her glitch rippled up her from her feet to the ends of her ponytail and she turned around, promptly ran into her desk, glitched again, and then turned back around to face Taffyta. "I can't believe you'd even _ask_ me that. You know what he _did_ to me the last time we raced together!"

"I know, I know!" Taffyta said, twisting her hands together. This was going really bad. Had she expected it to go any other way? "But Vanellope, if you'd just like—just listen for a second—he's totally miserable—"

"Big deal!" Vanellope shouted, glitching again so that it garbled her voice. She had never, not once since becoming president, raised her voice at any of her fellow racers. There had been times before when she'd yelled at them, but they'd all laughed and taunted her more. What was funnier than the glitch thinking she could _possibly_ intimidate any of them?

There'd been a time, five years ago or longer, when Taffyta, Candlehead, and Rancis had caught Vanellope trying to break into the kart factory. She had drawings, plans, of the way she wanted her kart to look. Who knew how she'd gotten them; Taffyta hadn't thought to ask. As they'd ripped the drawings up and chased her off, Taffyta had sneered, "Even if you didn't get us unplugged, you know what the _real_ tragedy would be, Vanellope? You'd embarrass yourself so bad that you wouldn't even be worth making fun of anymore. Even the NPCs would be laughing at you!"

Vanellope had clenched her fists and gritted her teeth and yelled back, glitching all the while, "Guess what, Taffyta! Someday I'm going to be a racer, and I'm going to remember every nasty thing you ever said to me, and maybe then you'll want to be friends and want something from me but _I'm not going to help_!"

The three of them had just laughed again, jumping in their karts and peeling out so that cocoa dust pelted Vanellope in the face. Taffyta hadn't looked in her mirror as she'd driven away.

They'd all had this one precious thing that Vanellope had wanted, and she'd wanted it so badly that she'd tried just about everything to get it. _Racing_. That was what it came down to, wasn't it? They all wanted to race. They were all _programmed_ to race. And now Vanellope was the one with the power. Taffyta was the one coming to ask for something, and Vanellope was surely remembering the fifteen years of torment and bullying at her hands, and at King Candy's. What did Vanellope care if King Candy was miserable?

There was a pounding on the door right at that moment, and before any Oreo guards could appear to get it, it creaked open. "Hey, there's a lot of yelling in here. Everything okay, kid?" said Ralph as he entered.

Vanellope was still glitching intermittently, and Taffyta suddenly found herself too scared to say anything. Ralph had _hated_ her before, because of the way she'd treated Vanellope. Things had gotten so much better between them lately. What if that all got ruined? She was lucky Ralph hadn't already given her his scariest bad guy look.

"Kid?" Ralph asked again, reaching the two of them and looking back and forth. His eyes lingered suspiciously on Taffyta for a second before he knelt down next to Vanellope. "Hey, President Fart Feathers, what's going on?"

At that, Vanellope cracked a smile. "Hey, Stinkbrain. It's nothing." Then, she glared around him. "Taffyta just asked me something stupid."

Even though she knew it was true, this still stung. Taffyta clenched her fists, and Ralph noticed. "Yeah, look, I know the whole giant fists, tiny head thing makes it hard to believe, but I'm not as dumb as I look. What's the problem?" He looked at Taffyta again, and said, more to her than Vanellope, really, "Is Muttonchops giving you a hard time about something?"

"No!" Taffyta protested. "I just asked…just asked…" She trailed off at the look Vanellope was giving her, feeling herself give up. This was pointless, just like she'd always known. Vanellope was never going to let King Candy get behind the wheel of a kart ever again, and it was hard to blame her.

But then, something hardened in her, and she curled her fists tighter. "I just asked if King Candy could race again."

"See?" Vanellope growled. " _Stupid_."

Taffyta braced herself for Ralph's temper, but to her surprise, he just stared at her. "Yeah, I gotta admit, it's not exactly your brightest idea ever, Muttonfudge."

The iron inside her stretched, getting more brittle, but didn't break. "I _know_ it's not," she snapped. "But guess what? I have to try! I _know_ he's Turbo, and he took over the game and tried to kill Vanellope! I _know_ he did everything he could to keep her from racing! And I _know_ that you're never, ever going to forgive him. Okay? I get it! But if _anyone_ should know what it's like to not be able to do the one thing in the world that you're supposed to be doing, that your whole code is written to do, then it's _you_ , Vanellope. You know how miserable he is, because you were too!"

"Because _he_ made me miserable," Vanellope shot back, glitching so badly that it was hard to understand her. "Maybe I never should have let him out of the fungeon."

Taffyta felt like she'd been punched in the gut. She hadn't _really_ thought that Vanellope might imprison King Candy again.

"Whoa," Ralph said. "How about you both take it down a notch, okay?"

Vanellope crossed her arms over her chest and stuck her lip out, looking unimpressed, and Taffyta tried to breathe normally. Her throat felt like it was one more fungeon threat away from closing up and making her burst into tears, and she didn't want to cry.

"I'm not gonna let him race," Vanellope said again.

"But—" Taffyta started.

"No! No way! It's not gonna happen! Right, Ralph?"

Putting his hands on his hips, Ralph said, "Right."

That was it. Here came the tears. Taffyta grit her teeth and calculated how close she could get to the throne room doors before she started sobbing.

"But I hate to say it, Taffyta's got a little bit of a point," he added. "You let him out of the fungeon, kid, but he's still basically in prison." He hesitated. "Maybe there's something he can do. _Besides_ racing."

Vanellope uncrossed her arms and put one hand on her hip. "Hm. Interesting." She looked at Taffyta, who suddenly realized she hadn't taken a breath in way too long, as though by not moving or breathing, she might affect the outcome of this conversation. It was pretty obvious she couldn't. It might be _better_ for them to forget she was there, and that this idea, whatever it was, to cut Turbo some slack, hadn't originated with her. "What does King Cavity do for fun, besides try to murder little kids and steal their thrones?" Vanellope asked.

Ralph held a up a hand before Taffyta could respond. "The little twerp deserved that." Vanellope looked smug. Glancing at Taffyta, Ralph went on, "What about letting him visit Game Central Station? We can keep an eye on him, make sure he doesn't get up to anything he's not supposed to." He paused, and Vanellope looked very doubtful. Too doubtful. She was never going to go for this. "Hey, you might as well reward good behavior, kid."

" _What_ good behavior?" Vanellope grumbled.

Taffyta straightened up and fixed Vanellope with a direct look. "He saved me from that virus when I got sick three months ago. He saved the whole _game_ when it got infected, even though he could have left it to die. And ever since then, he's never tried to escape, and he's been…well, I know not nice _all_ the time, but he's been okay, hasn't he?" She turned to Ralph and appealed to him. "Right?"

"He's definitely showing some improvement," Ralph said. "I mean, the bar was pretty low. But still."

There was a long silence, and then Vanellope said, "Security has to be really good. No way am I gonna be the dum-dum who let Turbo game-jump again."

"He won't game-jump," Taffyta said vehemently. When Vanellope looked at her, one eyebrow raised disbelievingly, Taffyta repeated, "He won't. He doesn't want to leave _Sugar Rush_." She hoped she was putting on a convincing performance, because the truth was, she wasn't quite sure that King Candy wouldn't leave _Sugar Rush_ and never look back, given the chance. Sure, three months ago he'd decided to stay, but that was before he'd been locked up for, well, three extra months, and before the full reality of not being able to race had hit him. Maybe he'd step through that outlet and be happy to be gone.

"I'll be with him," she added. Not that Vanellope or Ralph would probably think much of this as security. But it suddenly seemed very important that Vanellope agree to this. Sure, it wasn't racing, but it was something to do. If Vanellope agreed to this, Taffyta would owe Ralph big time. So would King Candy. And they'd owe Vanellope too, but that was nothing new. Taffyta would keep reminding him, and he would keep scoffing, but maybe slowly, the two of them could start to get along. And maybe that could start here.

Vanellope looked at Ralph again, who motioned to her with his hand. "Ugh," she said. " _Fine_. But you better not make me regret it, Taff. _And_ ," she added over the sound of Taffyta squealing and clapping in happiness, "we have to have some ground rules, okay?"

With effort, Taffyta made herself stand still. "Right, yeah. Ground rules, of course. Duh."

"Rule number one!" Vanellope said grandly, pointing a finger in the air. "No unauthorized visits to Game Central Station. That means you get my permission first."

"Maybe just have them _tell_ you first," Ralph suggested.

After thinking about that for a second, Vanellope agreed, "Sure, fine. Rule number two, no going in other games."

After the elation of the previous moment, it felt like Taffyta's heart plummeted off the side of Sno-Cap Peak at this. "Not _any_ other games?" she asked. "Then what's the point? Game Central Station is fine but it's going to get boring after like, an hour."

"Yeah, you're not wrong," Ralph said. "But speaking as someone who knows his way around this arcade—"

"Knows his way around the arcade _bathrooms_ , that is," Vanellope said.

"Hey, I saved you from using the ones in _Burger Time_ ," Ralph said, and Vanellope shrugged in acknowledgement. "Anyway, no one's going to go for Turbo wandering in and out of their games. He can go to Game Central Station. Any games, though, he's going to have to get permission from whoever's in charge."

As much as she wanted to argue, Taffyta knew this was reasonable, and realistically more than King Candy ever should have hoped for. "How do I get permission? I don't even know what to start," she said.

Ralph picked up Taffyta's untouched piece of cake and took a bite. "I can give you a hand with that."

"What? But…but…" Taffyta suddenly found that her mouth wouldn't work quite right. Why would Ralph be helping her and King Candy? He didn't like King Candy at all, and he only liked her a little. "Why?"

With a shrug, Ralph said, "Guess I'm in a good mood today."

She opened her mouth to press the issue, then thought better of it and clamped it shut. Maybe she didn't want him to think too hard about it. Instead, she awkwardly stuck out a hand. "Thanks, Ralph."

He smiled kindly at her, and Taffyta understood for just a flash of a second why Vanellope had trusted him so quickly when he'd come crashing into their game and disrupted the fifteen year stasis of everything. "Maybe those Bad Anon meetings are paying off or something," he said, then gave her a pat on the back that Taffyta could only assume was supposed to be gentle. It almost knocked her over.

Taffyta glanced at Vanellope, who had the end of one of her hoodie laces stuck in her mouth and was flickering with glitchy blue binary occasionally. It was obvious that the president still thought this was a bad idea. Well then, Taffyta would just have to show her that she was wrong.


	5. Chapter 5

CHAPTER 5

Taffyta skidded into her parking spot at _Sugar Rush's_ outlet. Well, okay. No one actually had assigned spots, but everyone _knew_ this was her spot and if they parked here, they'd be hearing from her. It was the best spot, closest to the exit, ideal for the social butterfly who didn't have time to walk an extra, oh, twenty-five feet.

It was hard not to scoff at herself. Social butterfly. Right. She hadn't done more than exchange pleasantries with her fellow racers in days.

She shut off her kart and sat in it for a second, listening to the creaking from the cooling engine. Her heart was pounding. Then she craned her neck to look at Turbo, who hadn't moved from his perch on the back of the kart. His fingers were still curled around the back of her seat and he looked mildly shaken. Big surprise; there wasn't much to the rear of her kart, it was all sleek curves down to the tires, and _she_ wouldn't want to sit back there. But she'd tried convincing him to ride in the front, and he'd just said, "Taff, this is undignified enough. Please."

At the time, she hadn't been sure if he meant riding on her kart or the ordeal they'd had to go through for him to take this visit outside _Sugar Rush_. She still wasn't.

"Ready?" she asked.

If her heart was pounding, she couldn't imagine how _he_ felt. Not that he'd ever show it. "Yeah, sure," he said nonchalantly. Then, after a hesitation, he added, "You're sure the alarms are turned off?"

"Yeah," she replied with more confidence than she felt. Vanellope had _said_ the alarms weren't on right now, but only stepping through the outlet would tell. It was pretty easy to imagine the kind of attention they were going to draw strolling through Game Central Station, the last thing they needed was for alarms to start going off.

Only one game had given him permission to enter its doors. The others had unanimously refused. Furiously, in most cases—not that Taffyta had been around to see that firsthand. Obviously. But she'd seen Ralph and Felix heading for Sugar Rush Castle and followed them, then refused to leave until they'd told her how it had gone.

" _Well_ ," Felix had said. "It, uh, it could have gone better, I suppose."

"What does that mean?" Taffyta had demanded of Ralph.

With a shrug, he'd said, "It was kind of Felix's thing. Figured people'd be a little more likely to listen to him, you know. Not being a bad guy, and all."

"Okay," she'd said, whirling to face Felix again, "so did it go, like, _bad_ , or something?" The look on his face answered this pretty unequivocally. Great. Just great. Sulkily—like it was Felix's fault?—she added, "Why would you want to help King Candy, anyway?"

Jiggling his hammer in his belt awkwardly, Felix had replied, "Turbo and I go way back, I guess. You know he was our neighbor, back when we all got plugged in?" Taffyta hadn't. "Not that that ever seemed to count for much with him."

This hadn't answered her question. The confusion must have shown on her face, so Felix had just sighed and shrugged. "Guess it's just something I've learned around here lately—sometimes you have to give folks a chance." He'd paused, then added, "But—jiminy jaminy, the rest of the arcade does _not_ feel that way." He'd taken his hat off then and rubbed at his hair tiredly. "They got awful upset. Sorry, Taffyta, I know that's not what you were hoping to hear."

Shoulders slumped, she'd asked, "So, did _anyone_ say yes?"

Felix and Ralph had looked at each other. Who would have thought they were such drama queens?

Standing at _Sugar Rush_ station, Taffyta fingered the zipper on her jacket, watching out the outlet exit into Game Central Station. Characters were walking past, blissfully unaware of the variable she was about to introduce into their lives. "People are going to stare, you know," she said without looking at Turbo.

"I'm used to people staring. People are drawn to greatness, you know."

She turned around and raised her eyebrows at him.

Flicking a wrist, he added, "Okay, so they're also drawn to car wrecks and political scandals but _hey,_ can't it be a little bit of both?" Binary ran up his body from his feet to his white and red helmet. "Shall we, then? I'd hate to keep my _adoring_ public waiting."

Taffyta couldn't help laughing a little. "Yeah, let's go. How bad can it be, right?"

At least Vanellope had been telling the truth about the alarm on _Sugar Rush_. When Turbo waved a hand across the threshold between _Sugar Rush_ and Game Central Station, nothing happened. Er, well, that wasn't _exactly_ true. A few NPCs from _Street Fighter_ caught sight of him and immediately bolted away, shouting something that sounded like 'game-jumper loose.' Turbo glitched again, this time all the way to King Candy, and said, "Off to a great sthtart already, hoo-hoo." With a little hop, he crossed fully into Game Central Station, standing outside _Sugar Rush_ for the first time in more than six months.

She followed him, watching as other characters spotted him (or heard the yelling) and gave their outlet a wide berth. The walk had never seemed longer, but King Candy seemed to let every panicked look and every glare roll off him. But then Chun-Li shouted, "We don't want you here, game-jumper!" and she saw him flinch. It was just a little, but it was there, and then after that, it was like a filter had been yanked away from her eyes, and she couldn't help seeing how much this long, brutal walk was taking out of him.

If she said anything, he'd deny it, so she just walked next to him and tried to let it roll off her, too. He was braver than her, though. By the end of the walk, she was staring at the ground, wishing she could sink into it.

But finally, _finally_ , they arrived. They stopped outside the outlet and looked up at the name scrolling across the electronic board. _Tapper's_. The one game in the arcade that had agreed to let Turbo visit.

When she'd found out, the first thing Taffyta had demanded was, " _What? One_ game, and it's not even _Fix-It Felix Jr._?!"

Felix had grimaced, then said, "Gene wouldn't hear it, Miss."

" _Gene?_ Who the heck is Gene? _You're_ in charge of the game, aren't you? It's named after you!"

With a chuckle, Ralph had said, "Ouch, Gene wouldn't like hearing that."

Shooting the wrecker a look, Felix had said to Taffyta, "No ma'am. Gene's the mayor of Niceland. _And_ head of the Homeowner's Association. I'm just the super. Any game decisions, well, they have to go through him."

After she'd gotten over the first rush of unhappiness, she'd asked sullenly, "So why is Tapper letting him in?" Felix and Ralph had both shrugged and said they didn't know. But Taffyta thought she did. She remembered when Tapper had tried to be kind to her, when she'd been sitting alone at the bar after listening to her fellow racers regale a crowd of transfixed listeners with stories of how horrible King Candy had been to them. He'd slid a root beer across the counter to her and said, "You know, whatever he turned into, Turbo was still one of us."

At the time, she hadn't wanted to hear it. She'd walked away, angry and sad and feeling let down and betrayed by everyone but most especially by King Candy. Now, staring up at the pixellated _Tapper's_ scrolling by every few seconds, she felt nothing but gratitude for him. Maybe she should pay him back for that free root beer.

The station with its little train was mercifully empty, and the two of them boarded one of the cars. It started with a jerk, trundling through the tunnel, gathering speed as it went. King Candy and Taffyta sat across from each other. He couldn't sit still. His fingers were fidgety, drumming on his legs or picking at the lapel on his tailcoat, and he was tapping one of his feet so fast that the motion was practically blurred.

She smiled at him. "You're not _nervous_ , are you?"

"Pfft." He met her eyes and gave her an easy grin, leaning back against the seat. " _Moi?_ Of _course_ not."

This was such an obvious lie that she just grinned back at him. Her mouth was as dry as sour apple sand and her palms felt gross and sweaty in her gloves. For a second, she wished they could turn back, but the trains didn't turn back, they only brought you on to your destination.

With a screech of brakes, the train slowed and pulled into the station at _Tapper's._ It rocked from side to side over the old tracks, and Taffyta grabbed at the side of the car, afraid, for one stupid second, that she was going to get bounced out. Then the doors popped open, and with a nervous laugh, she pried her fingers from around the pitted plastic of the train car and followed King Candy to the platform.

They looked at the door to the bar in silence for a second, and then King Candy debonairly offered her his arm. "Guessth I'm your escort to this five star establishment this evening, Miss Muttonfudge."

She giggled, hearing it come out much higher than usual, and tried not to feel faint.

When they stepped through the door, the bar went completely, dead silent. So quiet you could hear a _pin_ drop quiet. The sea of glares almost made Taffyta back out, despite all of her resolution and everything she'd said to Turbo.

Maybe this _had_ been a stupid idea—maybe the arcade wasn't ready for him. But what if they were _never_ ready? Was he supposed to stay trapped in _Sugar Rush_ forever? Granted, that's what he'd done to Vanellope, but…Vanellope had given her blessing for her former tormenter to visit Game Central Station.

Well, blessing wasn't the right word. Permission. _Grudging_ permission.

She tightened her fingers around King Candy's arm, not knowing if it was more for his benefit or hers. Then she stepped across the threshold of the door, feeling the tiniest amount of resistance from him. He followed though, and the bar seemed to get, if possible, quieter. Every single eye was on them, unfriendly, accusing, and the message couldn't have been clearer: _Get out, you're not welcome here._ And it occurred to her that by stepping in here with him, she was tainting herself further. She was further associating herself with a monster who most of these people would never forgive. This seemed clear, suddenly, so clear that she wondered how she'd never seen it before. These people would never, ever forgive him.

The scrape of a tankard across the bar broke the silence. Tapper had been the first to move, sliding the mug he'd just filled across the bar to Luigi. "Anyone else need a refill?" the bartender asked, his voice sounding unnaturally loud.

Taffyta thought again of that time Tapper had shown her sympathy in those first months after _Sugar Rush's_ reset, when life had seemed terrible and she'd spent half her time wondering if she wasn't a bit of corrupted code herself. She hadn't been grateful then because the last thing she'd wanted to acknowledge was how much King Candy had meant to her, not when she'd just seen him revealed for who he truly was. She'd spent so much time convinced she hadn't meant anything to him and hating herself for the fact that she could be upset about that instead of everything else. The game-jumping. The re-programming. The locking up their memories. The trying to delete Vanellope. All of it.

But she was grateful now as she marched up to the bar with King Candy in tow. "Could we have two root beers please, Tapper?" she said with a brightness that she didn't feel. Even though she couldn't see them anymore, she could still feel the glares of every other bar patron boring into her back.

"Two root beers, coming up," Tapper said in the same tone of voice he said when he served everyone.

Someone scoffed behind them and a chair scraped loudly on the floor in the silence. "I'm not drinking at the same place _he_ is," a voice said, and Taffyta couldn't help turning around. Ken from _Street Fighter_ was standing up, and the rest of the characters from his game followed suit. Then another table got up and left.

Taffyta was wondering with a sinking feeling if the entire bar was going to empty out, but then, suddenly, she heard, "Hey! Hey, guys, over here!" Turning, she saw Jubileena waving wildly from the bar in the back.

A fierce rush of gratitude flooded her. When she needed them most, her fellow racers were there for her. Taffyta grabbed her root beer in one hand and King Candy's arm in her other and pulled him towards the back bar, which was like a beacon of safe harbor. He barely had time to snatch his root beer off the bar and follow her.

Jubileena, Snowanna, Adorabeezle, and Gloyd were sitting around the table, and Jubileena was scooting over to make space for the two of them when they arrived. Snowanna and Gloyd pulled up to neighboring, recently vacated chairs. Then, for a long, awkward moment, nobody said anything. Taffyta realized she'd sloshed a bunch of root beer over the side of her glass onto her gloves.

"Um," she said, and then put the root beer on the bar.

Now that they were standing there, Jubileena looked like she sort of regretted calling them over. But after a second, she motioned to the two empty chairs and said, "Well, sit down."

Another group of characters walked out, and then three of the ghosts from _Pac-Man_. "Get out of here, game jumper," one of them hissed.

King Candy raised an eyebrow and smiled a little, then sat down in one of the empty chairs and steepled his fingers on the bar. "Stho," he said. "It's been awhile, hasn't it, kids?"

Gloyd and Adorabeezle looked at each other nervously. "Yeah," Adorabeezle said with a swallow. "Yeah it's, um, been awhile."

Sitting up straight, Snowanna asked bravely, "So what are we supposed to call you now?"

"Taffyta calls him King Candy," Jubileena said.

He glitched a little. "That's perfectly fine."

Something hit the wall behind Taffyta's head and she screamed and jumped. A slice of greasy pizza was sliding slowly down the wall, and she watched as it unpeeled and plopped onto the floor with a splatter of sauce. "Did any of you see who threw that?" she demanded.

Gloyd looked around the bar, but Taffyta could see as well as he could, and no one looked any more like the culprit that anyone else. _Any_ of them could have done it. They obviously all hated King Candy. Had she been expecting anything different? Well, yeah, if she was being honest—she hadn't expected food to be thrown at them.

Clearing her throat, Snowanna said, "At least they had bad aim."

King Candy chuckled, and Snowanna looked nervous. Taffyta took a long sip of root beer just for something to do, because this was totally not the triumphant moment that the really stupid, childish part of her brain that she couldn't shut up thought it was going to be.

"So, um," Gloyd said. "You race today, Taffyta?"

Like he didn't know. Every single one of them knew who was on the roster every single day, _especially_ if they themselves weren't on it. "Yeah," she said. "I kicked Adorabeezle's butt, as usual."

Adorabeezle scoffed but didn't deny it, and King Candy flashed a grin at Taffyta that made her beam. Even if he couldn't race, at least he seemed proud of her. That was something. She couldn't tell if he was less miserable since Vanellope had decreed that he could leave _Sugar Rush_. This experience definitely wasn't giving him anything to be less miserable about, but he seemed cheerful and unconcerned that every single person in the bar outside of their group (and Tapper, of course), without exception, was glaring at him.

Jubileena eyed King Candy. "Sort of weird without you out there, Tur—er, King Candy." Then, she looked panicked that she'd said anything at all. "I mean, uh, that is—" She grabbed at Snowanna. " _Don't_ tell Vanellope I said that, I didn't mean _bad_ -weird, just…just _different_ -weird."

With a small shrug, Adorabeezle offered quietly, "It's not a crime to admit there were lots of big changes after the game reset."

"Not bad changes," Snowanna added quickly.

Gloyd leaned forward. "But none of us like the randomizer."

"Ugh!" Jubileena said. "No way. I hate that thing! I used to be on the roster almost every day. Now…" She shrugged.

"Yeah," Taffyta agreed. "Trust me, I know." No one hated the randomizer quite as much as she did. Obviously. It hadn't made any of them go Turbo, like she had three months ago.

King Candy watched another group go, and Taffyta saw them mouth something at him that you couldn't say in _Sugar Rush_. "So," he said, turning back to them. "Let me get this straight. None of you like the gl— _Vanellope's_ little randomizer experiment. Have any of you actually _said_ anything to her about it? Maybe, I don't know, here's a thought, told her to go back to the Random Roster Race?"

"Oh, no," Adorabeezle said. "We couldn't do that."

"Why not?" he asked, raising an eyebrow.

"Because." Adorabeezle looked at the others for help. "We just can't."

Another glitch ran down his arms, and King Candy leaned an elbow on the bar. The others leaned back, like they were afraid to get too close. Taffyta snorted to herself. Of course they were afraid to get too close. They were still afraid of him. He smiled. "I sthuppose it's because of the way _poor_ little Vanellope was treated for, how long was it again? Fifteen years?"

Snowanna blanched, Jubileena's eyes filled with tears, and Gloyd looked like he wanted to crawl under the table. Elbowing King Candy, Taffyta turned to him and muttered, "Maybe this isn't the best time?"

King Candy gave her a half smile and sat back in his chair again, then ducked as something whistled through the air and narrowly avoided his head. Root beer splashed everywhere as a tankard hit the wall and he spluttered as it drenched his head. The other four racers stared, wide-eyed. Taffyta was sure that if they hadn't already been regretting inviting King Candy and her over, then they were now.

Wringing root beer out of his bow tie, King Candy said, "You know, I'm starting to think that I'm not really welcome here." Kicking the root beer mug away from his foot, he added, "Just a feeling, of course. So, popcorn anyone? Think I might get some."

"Maybe we should just go," Taffyta said. It felt like admitting defeat, like being in fourth place and _just_ close enough that you had a shot at getting third, and then falling short.

He looked at her, then nodded and stood up, shaking root beer off his sleeves. "Nice catching up," he said casually to the other four racers, and then, with a flash of a smile, added, "I'm still getting that popcorn."

It was hard to watch his passage to the other side of the bar. The characters that were left inside glared at him, making rude comments that they didn't even bother to keep the voices down for. There was a bounce in his step, though, and when he came back, tossing popcorn into his mouth, he said, "You know, I used to eat this stuff all the time. Used to be the best food in the arcade, well, not that _BurgerTime_ isn't pretty good but there's just _something_ about this fake butter flavor, don't you think?"

"Um," Adorabeezle said, then didn't go on. No one else added anything. Snowanna and Jubileena met her eyes but didn't quite meet King Candy's, and Gloyd didn't even look up.

Taffyta sighed. "See you guys on the track tomorrow." Then, she turned towards the door, King Candy at her side. The minute they exited, the noise inside went from funeral parlor to sports arena. She heard the garble of him glitching behind her, and when she looked at him, Turbo was staring back at her, his yellow eyes containing a multitude of emotions—resignation, amusement, and a complete and total lack of surprise. She sighed again, and didn't say anything more.

* * *

"It could've been worse," Turbo said.

Taffyta snorted. "Yeah, a mob could have come after us with pitchforks."

He chuckled. "See? Nice to hear you being so positive, Taffyta."

Against her will, she giggled, said, "Oh, be quiet," then stretched her legs out so that her shoes knocked against his helmet. He was stretched out along the front of her kart, which was parked at the top of the Rainbow Bridge. The view was fantastic, one of the best in the game, and Taffyta stared out over Chocolate Town, past Sugar Rush Castle to Diet Cola Mountain, until her eyes reached the sparkling Kool-Aid Sea, far in the distance.

Stretching his arms out, Turbo put his hands under his head and crossed one leg over the other. He jiggled his foot and said, "Think Tapper will let me come back?"

"You didn't do anything wrong," she said. "Why wouldn't he let you come back?" Like she couldn't think of any reasons, but it made her feel better to pretend like that had all gone really well.

He tilted his head backwards to look at her. "I dunno, I caused a…shall we say, disturbance? Tapper's not big on anyone upsetting the zen in his bar." He tossed a piece of popcorn into his mouth. "Think I'll get a cease and desist letter or something?"

" _No_ ," she said vehemently. "I'm sure Tapper will let you come back. That is…you do _want_ to leave the game, again, right?" Maybe he didn't. Maybe that had been such a disaster that he'd rather stay in _Sugar Rush_ and be miserable all the time. She grabbed a fistful of popcorn and tried to stuff too much of it in her mouth at once, dropping it all over herself. Stupid. Then her eyes started stinging. Even _stupider_. Why did she have to be such a crybaby all the time?

After a second, he sat up, turning to face her. His eyes flicked over her face, no doubt taking in the puffiness around her eyes and the way they were starting to redden with tears. "No one wants me out there, Taff. You know they don't. _I_ know they don't. Sure, I want to leave the game again. But, you know, at a certain point, you sorta start wondering why you should even bother."

The sting in her eyes abruptly disappeared and she glared at him. "You should _bother_ because…because…" For a moment, nothing came to her. But then what came spilling out was, "Because you're part of this arcade, too! No matter what anyone else thinks or wants, _you_ are just as much a part of this place as any of them. And you know what, yeah. You did some pretty bad stuff." She drew in a deep breath. He remained silent, watching her. "But that doesn't mean you just roll over and say, oh well, I guess everyone hates me now, so I'm not even going to try. They're gonna treat you bad, and they're not gonna like you, not at first. That's like, well, that's like the fallout from going Turbo, right? That's the fallout from game-jumping, and taking over _Sugar Rush_."

"You forgot trying to delete the glitch," he said, his tone hard to read.

She clenched her fists. " _You're_ the one who taught me not to panic and not to give up, even when you think you're done for and you lost. So don't you _dare_ act like you're just going to lie down and die."

Binary crackled across his body, and he leaned an arm on his knee. When he'd reappeared in her life, she'd been terrified of his sodium yellow stare, burning with a level of intensity that he couldn't seem to tone down. Now she saw it all the time, because she'd started to see that his gaze was just as intense when he looked like King Candy. Somewhere along the line it had stopped being scary, and she realized, suddenly, that part of what was bothering her now was that lately, that intensity seemed to have burned down to almost nothing, so it was too low for her to see.

"Is that what you think I'm doing?" he finally asked, sounding surprised. "Lying down and dying?" Slowly, he took a handful of popcorn, staring at it for a moment while his hand glitched. Then, he put a piece in his mouth and chewed it, watching her with one eyebrow raised. "You know who you're talking to, right?"

Taffyta smiled a little. "It's sort of hard to forget with that big, dumb, dorky T on your helmet."

Looking nonplussed, he said, "I'll have you know this was pretty cool back in 1982."

They looked at each other for a minute, and then, impulsively, Taffyta hugged him. "So does that mean you're not giving up?" she asked, her voice muffled against his jumpsuit.

He patted her shoulder. "I'm definitely not giving up. Or panicking. Or throwing the towel in, or whatever you want to call it. I'm…I mean, this is putting it kind of lightly, but I'm pretty tenacious." When she leaned back, he glitched to King Candy and said, "Anyway, if you think _thisth_ is me depressed, you should've seen me about seven years into my stint hiding in the bowels of Game Central Station. I was _really_ a downer then, hoohoohoo."

That made her giggle, even though it really wasn't funny. Like, not funny at all. "So, do we pretend this day never happened? Start again tomorrow?"

Tossing another piece of popcorn into his mouth, King Candy said. "Sort of. See the thing is, you don't ever _forget_ something, even if you don't want to think about it. You remember and you learn your lesson, and that's how you survive. Or at least," he said, tugging at the lapels of his coat and shrugging, "that's how I survived. Guess I didn't do too bad a job, don't you think?" He leaned a hand on the hood of her kart and turned his head to look into the distance, his gaze unfocused. Taffyta wondered what he was looking at.

After several moments of silence, he said slowly, "We need a plan."

She looked at him. Huh? "A plan? What…what kind of plan?"

Waving a hand, he said, "A plan to do _something_. Race again, preferably. Barring that…" He trailed off, then asked, "Got any brilliant ideas?"

A plan. Wasn't that exactly what she'd been doing, trying to come up with a plan? Except her plan had mostly consisted of begging Vanellope to let him race again and Vanellope predictably turning her down. That wasn't a _plan_. "No," she said, trying not to sound hopeless. "Even if Vanellope didn't hate you, you don't need to race. We have fifteen racers and the randomizer."

A slow smile spread across his face. "Fifteen racers and the randomizer. You know Taff, you're exactly right."

"Er, I know I am."

"And as a matter of fact—hey." Something seemed to occur to him. "Does the glitch really _hate_ me? I thought we had something more like a rivalry going on, here."

"Maybe 'hate' is a strong word," Taffyta admitted. "She just seriously doesn't like you. But hold on—" She turned to face him, pulling her legs up underneath her. "What do you mean, 'I'm exactly right?'"

King Candy looked out over Sugar Rush again, that smile still on his face. "It means…well, it means I think I might have the beginnings of a plan…"


	6. Chapter 6

CHAPTER 6

The way the light streamed into Game Central Station was really pretty, and Taffyta was feeling sort of bad that she'd never noticed it before. She'd only been coming here for fifteen years, after all. But GCS had always just been a place to pass through, not somewhere to hang out. Definitely not somewhere to stand around admiring the architecture.

These days, she seemed to be spending a lot of time there. Enough time to notice not just the nice way the light streamed in, but also how fast the scrolling electronic letters blipped across the signs above each outlet, the way the corners of the massive hall were spotless even though she never saw anyone cleaning, the chips and scratches on the benches lining the middle of the hall, and even the way Surge Protector clicked his pen in and out without seeming to realize he was doing it.

She'd gotten to know the _Tapper's_ outlet pretty well, too. That experiment had been repeated a few times, each one maybe, _possibly_ going incrementally better than the last. King Candy had gotten a root beer dumped on him by Tails last time, who'd then sped out of the bar laughing, his tails helicoptering behind him.

But she spent a lot of time in Game Central Station with him wandering back and forth. Even though when she looked across it from one end to the other, it seemed like they should be able to walk the length of the hall in five minutes—ten if they weren't in any hurry and eleven if they rode instead of walked up the escalators at the north end—it somehow seemed to take much longer, like GCS was a world to explore.

Right now, though, she was staring at the light falling to the floor in solid, luminescent golden shafts, illuminating the huge windows to a blinding glare haloed with fringes of brightness. And she knew King Candy was staring at her, because she could see him out of the corner of her eyes, watching her with his arms crossed over his chest. The gumdrop on his foot jingled as he tapped his shoe on the ground. She knew he was staring because she'd been silent for a good two and a half minutes now, and two and a half minutes to him when he was waiting for an answer was like a lifetime.

"You're not saying anything," he finally pointed out.

"I know I'm not," she said.

He chuckled. "Well, that was _something_." He sidled into her field of vision. "That's a little bit of an improvement."

She met his eyes. "There's no way we can do that."

"Ugh, Taffyta, _why_ did I have a feeling you'd say that?"

Under normal circumstances, the conversation they'd been having would have freaked her out so much that she would have insisted they couldn't have it here. But their presence had an interesting effect on the other denizens of the arcade—as they moved through Game Central Station, everyone else moved away from them, like polarized magnets. The result was that there were few places more private than their bubble of space in GCS. Even in _Sugar Rush_ , Taffyta guessed it was possible that someone might be eavesdropping. Not that Vanellope would do that. At least, Taffyta didn't _think_ she would. It wouldn't be hard, though. A couple licorice wires, gummy bugs in the walls—

She shook herself. That obviously wasn't happening. But she was still glad King Candy had chosen to have this conversation in Game Central Station, where they were guaranteed not to be overheard.

"You probably had a feeling I'd say that because _you_ just said something totally crazy," she replied.

"It's not _totally_ crazy," he said. "Just—hoo-hoo— _marginally_ crazy."

Looking around to make sure no one had failed to recognize them and accidentally come within earshot, she said in a low voice, "There is _no_ way we're doing that. I wouldn't even know _how_ to do it."

"Well, _that_ part's easy—"

"I _mean_ I wouldn't know where to _start_ to even be in a place where we do that," Taffyta interrupted. "You're talking about _going in the code vault_ , and there's no way in a million, _billion_ years that anyone's going to let you near that."

He shrugged. "Well, you know, I _do_ like a challenge."

With a helpless sigh, she said, "No. No way." When he looked at her, an eyebrow raised, she said again, "No! I'm serious. Even if I thought this was a good idea, which I totally don't, by the way, I can't help you get in the code vault." She looked back towards the light spilling in through the windows. "You're my friend, but I can't do that."

King Candy looked impatient. "Look, I'm not going to _mess_ with anything."

"What do you mean? You _just said_ you want to change the code on the randomizer!"

"Oh, well." He waved a hand. "Nothing _important_ , I mean. You heard it yourself, most of your fellow racers don't even like that thing. _You_ don't like it."

"That's not the point!" Taffyta looked around again to make sure everyone was still keeping their distance. Some toadstools from _Super Mario Bros_ were sidling along the wall well out of earshot. Everyone else had pretty much ceded this side of Game Central Station to them. The emptiness made the hall look even larger than it actually was. A thought occurred to her, and even though it had nothing to do with—well, anything, she said, "It would be fun to drive around out here, wouldn't it?"

Bouncing on his heels, he said, "I used to do that. Surge _hated_ it. Wait—hey, don't change the subject." He tweaked the brim of her hat. "Nice try."

"I wasn't!" she protested, grabbing her hat and pushing it back up. Then, she grinned at the idea of him peeling out in Game Central Station, doing figure eights and skidding in circles, with Surge looking on disapprovingly and trying totally futilely to stop him. She could just picture the glee on his face, the unbridled joy. Then, looking at him, she sighed. Maybe she _had_ been trying to change the subject. "I haven't tried talking to Vanellope yet. She might agree to go back to the Random Roster Race."

"You know she won't," King Candy said flatly. "Haven't you noticed how obnoxiously stubborn she is? She'll insist on sticking with the _randomizer_ until she drives—pun intended, hoohoohoo—the game into the ground."

Taffyta shifted uncomfortably. "I don't think she would. She'd notice. Vanellope's smart." When he scoffed, she said, "She _is._ And she cares just as much about this game as any of us do."

"Does she?" he asked, raising his eyebrows.

"Of course!" Taffyta spluttered. "She's the princess! Er, president, I mean."

Rolling his eyes, he said, "Right, whatever she wants to call herself. She _also_ spent fifteen years as an outcast—yes, yes, I know, no need to say it, because of me, and I'm not proud of it, blah blah blah, but the point _is_ , well, I'm not sure the depth of her feelings for _Sugar Rush_ are as, you know, profound as yours or mine are."

She opened her mouth to respond, then closed it. He had a point, not that she really wanted to admit it. Maybe King Candy was comfortable with what he'd done to Vanellope, but Taffyta definitely wasn't okay with the role she'd played in it. Admitting that Vanellope still held the whole game at arm's length was just another knot in the tangle of guilt that Taffyta carried around with her all the time.

But…maybe he had a point. If Vanellope _didn't_ love _Sugar Rush_ as much as Taffyta and King Candy did, then maybe she'd let the players bleed away until it was too late to do anything. Maybe it was their duty to the game to fix it themselves.

Or maybe not. It still seemed like a terrible idea. Still, she sighed and said, "Okay. So go over it again. What do you want to do?"

With a grin, he put his fingertips together and said, "I knew you'd come around."

"I'm not coming around."

He just smiled. "So. We know that the gamers are abandoning _Sugar Rush_ , right?"

"I don't think _abandoning_ is the right word," Taffyta said uneasily.

He waved this away. "Our—your—popularity has taken a nosedive. Well, not _you_ specifically, Taff, you seem as popular as ever, you know, when you're on the roster—" This wasn't exactly true, as Vanellope was still by far the most popular racer in the game, but it was nice of him to say. "—which, hoo-hoo, brings me to my next point." He stopped and cleared his throat. " _Why_ are the gamers leaving _Sugar Rush_ in droves? No new game's been plugged in, right? We're not malfunctioning, we're not _glitching_. So what is it?"

"The randomizer," Taffyta said quietly.

"Ex _actly_ ," he said. "The randomizer gives every racer a chance to be on the roster. Which sounds all well and good if it's _you_ , or Candlehead or Minty or Snowanna or even the _glitch_ , I may not like her but I supposthe I have to admit she can race. But if the racers are, oh, I don't know, Torvald, or Sticky, or Nougetsia? And what if all four palette swaps were to be on the roster at the same time?"

She crossed her arms over her chest. "Probably even fewer gamers would be playing. The recolors get chosen the least, anyway."

With a calculating grin, King Candy said, "And at that point it would behoove the glitch—"

"Vanellope."

"—to admit that the randomizer's a terrible idea and abolish it. Go back to the Random Roster Race."

On the other side of Game Central Station, a group of people was pointing at them. Others seemed to be directing traffic so that no one came anywhere near them. It was too far for her to see who any of them were, but she was pretty sure at least a couple of the _Crazy Taxi_ characters were down there. Maybe that wasn't too surprising. It went without saying that none of the other racing games in the arcade had wanted Turbo anywhere near them, but they'd been dealing with it in different ways. No one had seen the _Finish Line_ racers in days. It seemed like the denizens of _Crazy Taxi_ were taking a different tack and actively stirring up resentment.

King Candy's eyes flicked in that direction, then back to her, and she crossed her arms over her chest. "Yeah, all of that makes sense," she said. "But _that's_ not the part I have a problem with. It was the other thing. The way they were all going to be on the roster at the same time."

With a shrug, he said, "Oh, that'll just require some minor—hoo-hoo—coding."

"Yeah. _That's_ where I'm sort of getting hung up."

Putting a hand on her shoulder and steering her towards the escalators, he said, "It'll only take me a few minutes; I'd be in and out of the code vault before anyone even knew it. The code's simple, exactly what I did for yours, only I'll probably have the algorithm ping them at a higher percentage, we want to make sure they're _really_ getting chosen a lot, and at the same time—"

Taffyta stopped in her tracks, arms still crossed. "It's not the amount of time it's going to take you. It's the fact that you want to go in the code vault at all. I mean, even if I thought we should do this, how am I supposed to sneak you in there?"

"Well, I hadn't gotten that far yet."

Heaving a deep sigh, she took her hat off and ran a hand through her hair, then immediately regretted messing it up. She needed a mirror but the bathrooms were all the way at the other end of the hall. "We'd have to create an _insane_ diversion, and Vanellope's not stupid. As soon as something weird started happening, she'd want to know where you were."

With another grin, he said, "I like the way you're thinking, Taffyta—we just need to figure out what _kind_ of diversion we need—"

But he stopped when she held out a hand. "We can't. We'd never be able to pull it off, and even if we could, I just…I really can't help you get into the code vault."

If he was disappointed, he hid it well. She was disappointed in herself, somehow. Wasn't she supposed to be helping him? That's what she'd set out to do. That's what she'd _told_ him she was going to do. And it wasn't a bad plan, exactly, it just…well, it definitely betrayed all the trust she'd built with Vanellope, for starters. And then after that, the rest of her fellow racers. She couldn't do it, or let him do it, or have anything to do with planning something like this.

Okay. So she'd have to disappoint him. Big deal! Well…it _was_ kind of a big deal. But it wasn't like friends never disappointed each other. Like, just the other day, Candlehead had wanted to climb trees in the Candycane Forest, and Taffyta had said she had other plans and couldn't go. The reality had been she didn't want to; those trees were sticky and gross, and the last thing she wanted to do was get trapped at the top of one. But Candlehead had looked crestfallen and Taffyta had felt bad. Not bad enough to change her mind. Sometimes you just had to hold your ground and…and make your friend feel bad.

"You don't seriously think we could pull something like that off…do you?" she asked.

King Candy arched an eyebrow. "Didn't you just say you can't help me?"

"Yeah," she said. She was just curious. On the face of it, it sounded totally crazy. How could the two of them possibly orchestrate something like that? Just starting to think about it made her head hurt. There were so many variables, so many things to go wrong. So many ways they could get caught. "But like, for the sake of argument. Do you?"

He narrowed his eyes in thought, staring into the space just above her shoulder. "Well let's see. The code vault's guarded, yes?"

"One guard," Taffyta said.

"Were you supposed to tell me that?" he asked, his smile sly.

Wrinkling her nose in chagrin, she said, "Probably not. I think there's cameras, too."

"Anything less and I'd be disappointed. At least I know they take me seriously, hoohoohoo." His look of concentration returned. "Okay, so." He bounced from his heels to his toes and back. "For me to get into the code vault, we need to take care of cameras and one guard. To satisfy your curiosity, yesth, I think we could do that."

She nodded slowly. Then, realizing she was actually thinking about it, she forced her mind off that track and gave him a stern look. "Well, just because we _could_ doesn't mean we're going to."

King Candy opened his mouth to respond, a flicker in his eyes that might have been the start of a glitch but might have just been a glint of determination. But then, before he said anything, he shut it again. It was another moment before he said, "Well, do you want to try running up the down escalator again, or have you had enough of that for today?"

It was impossible to tell what he was thinking. Was he annoyed? Hurt? Disappointed? Or none of the above? Taffyta knew he understood that going in the code vault was like, mission critical, do not allow. Maybe he was just thinking about how he'd get in for the sake of thinking about it? It still wasn't something she wanted to encourage; it would, after all, be all too easy for someone to overhear them and _totally_ misunderstand, and think they were for real planning a code vault break-in—

"Hey, you two look guilty."

Taffyta jumped and let out a tiny scream, whirling around only to see Wreck-It Ralph standing there, his hands on his hips. "Oh!" she said. "Um, hi. That's weird, Ralph, why would you say we look guilty…uh…"

King Candy glanced at her, glitched to Turbo, and then looked to Ralph. "You shouldn't sneak up on people like that, Ham Hands. Aren't you trying to reform yourself into a good guy?"

"Nah," Ralph said, his gaze shifting to Turbo. "I'm good with the bad guy thing. Being bad doesn't mean I have to be bad, you know?"

"Nope," Turbo said unconcernedly.

"Maybe you should come to a Bad Anon meeting." Ralph rolled his eyes. "I doubt it would help, but with you, it's definitely not going to hurt."

Making a face, Turbo said, "Isn't Bad Anon that lame kumbaya, hand-holding group that Clyde from _Pac-Man_ runs?"

"Yup, that's the one," Ralph said.

With another glitch, back to King Candy, he said, "Well, I'm glad you found your zen, Ralph. I think I'll pass, though. Doesn't—hoo-hoo—seem like my _scene_ , if you know what I mean."

By this point, Taffyta's heart rate had slowed. Ralph wasn't suspicious of them, he was just giving them a hard time, like he always did when King Candy was around. With a snort, Ralph said, "Yeah, that's for sure—it's definitely not your scene, but I don't think that's as cool as you think it is."

King Candy just shrugged. "I sthuppose I stopped being cool right around the time 8-bit went out of style, didn't I?"

Rolling his eyes, Ralph said, "Nice try. You stopped being _cool_ when you got two games unplugged, bozo. I'd say you didn't help your case with this latest stunt, but really, you didn't have much lower to sink."

Raising an eyebrow, King Candy asked, "Does it count as my _latest_ stunt when it was actually fifteen years ago, and I only got caught recently? I know fifteen's more than the number of fingers you've got, Ralph, but you _are_ barefoot. You can feel free to use your toes, too. I won't be offended."

Anger flashed across Ralph's face, but then he held up his hands and said, "You know what, fine. You wanna be that way, I can just be on my merry way. Forget I even stopped over here."

And _that_ set off alarm bells in Taffyta's head. "Ralph, wait!" Hopping up to grab his arm—how stupid, like she was going to what, stop him from leaving? Nine foot tall Wreck-It Ralph was really going to be slowed down by her, at a whopping three feet and sixty pounds? But he actually stopped. Probably used to Vanellope hanging off him. "Why did you come over?" she asked before he changed his mind and kept walking.

Ralph glared at King Candy. "Maybe another time, if you can get your creepy little friend to behave."

"No, seriously." She glanced over her shoulder at King Candy and gave him a meaningful look. There was no way Ralph had just stopped over here for a social call. Sure, she and him had sorta kinda become friends, a little bit, but not enough that he'd spot her from the other side of GCS and come over. "King Candy's just…joking. Yeah."

Ralph snorted. "You need to work on your acting skills there, kid. I know I look dumb, but I can tell antisocial behavior when I see it." He shot King Candy another dirty look and got a cool stare in return. "I shouldn't even bother, but the reason I came over was to ask _him_ a question."

Taffyta motioned to King Candy—a motion that she hoped conveyed, _you should apologize and_ be nice _because we, and by we I mean_ you _, need all the friends we can get in this place_.

It probably didn't. In fact, if the way he was furrowing his forehead at her was any indication, she probably just looked a little crazy. But after a second, he looked at Ralph, adjusted his crown on his head, and said, "I suppose I could choose my words a little more carefully. I didn't really _mean_ to imply that you can't count."

"Yes you did."

"Well, fine, but you know, not every joke's going to be a winner, right? We'll just take that one out of rotation…"

This was, Taffyta was sure, about as close to an apology as Ralph was going to get. And King Candy _did_ look mildly contrite, though she knew that he was lying about the joke. He still thought it was funny. She could tell from the little twitch at the corner of his mouth.

Ralph put his hands on his hips and looked up at the ceiling, a long-suffering expression on his face, before looking back to Taffyta. "Okay, Muttonchops. I don't really buy it, but I can appreciate that you're putting in the work to train him. I already walked all the way over here, anyway." He put a hand to the back of his neck. "Here's the thing, you two." Then, he paused, seemed to think about what he was going to say— _re_ think what he was going to say, as in, maybe decide not to say it at all, and Taffyta felt her heart move somewhere into the region of her vocal cords. She felt certain that whatever Ralph wanted to tell them, it was a good thing. "We—I mean, Felix and me, oh and I guess technically Gene, I have to say that—we were wondering if you'd want to visit our game sometime. You know, check out how things have changed since, oh, 1987?" He paused and smirked a little. "The last time you were cool, King Puffy Pants, in case you're keeping track."

King Candy blinked, genuinely surprised. He opened his mouth to respond, then closed it again and just stared at Ralph. All Taffyta could do was watch him, her lips pressed together while she waited for him to say something. Something hopefully nice, that wouldn't make Ralph take back what he'd just said. "Er," King Candy finally replied. Then, he cleared his throat and shook off some of the surprise. "Ralph, I'd be delighted to accept the invitation."

Taffyta clapped her hands together and couldn't quite muffle the squeal of happiness, which made Ralph look at her and grin. "Oh, thank you thank you _thank you,_ Ralph, it'll be so awesome to visit another game!"

"Not that _Tapper'sth_ isn't the height of fascinating," King Candy said, surprise giving way to a slow grin on his face. "But, well, I have to admit—it'll make a nice change to see something new. Old, I suppose, if you want to be technical."

Unable to contain her joy, Taffyta hugged Ralph quickly. He patted her head awkwardly and she skipped to King Candy's side, then grabbed his hand happily. Ralph shook his head, looking like he wished he wasn't smiling. Good to know that her enthusiasm was contagious, she guessed. "We always figured you fancy 64-bit racers thought you were too good for _Fix-It Felix, Jr._ ," Ralph said. "Looks like the tables have turned."

Raising an eyebrow, King Candy replied, "For the record, you were right. Ooh, do you see what I did there? Tables turning, record…" When this was met with silence, he waved a hand and sighed, "Why is it that no one in this arcade can appreciate a good pun?"

"I'd appreciate it if I heard one," Ralph said. A smirk flashed across King Candy's face.

" _Attention. Attention,_ " a voice said over the Game Central Station PA, cutting the conversation short. " _The arcade will open in fifteen minutes. Please report to your games._ "

Ralph ran a hand through his bristly hair. "Well, Muttonchops, King Cavity, it's been real. Gotta get back to the salt mine, though," he said. He started to turn away, then looked at them again. His gaze seemed more probing than usual and Taffyta began to get nervous again. What if he thought they _were_ up to something and not just idly talking about a hypothetical situation? Not that he'd even heard them. Had he?

Characters were scurrying out of games, running late from whatever assignation they'd been on and rushing to get back to their own before the first quarter alert. "Let Vanellope know when you're gonna come by," he said.

"I believe those _are_ the terms of my visitation rightsth," King Candy said wryly.

Annoyance flashed over Ralph's face. "You don't like it, you don't have to leave _Sugar Rush_ at all."

Holding up his hands, which glitched red for a second, King Candy said, "And of course I didn't mean to imply that those terms are anything other than _completely_ reasonable."

"Huh." Turning his gaze to Taffyta, Ralph said, "You're in charge, Muttonchops. I hate to say it, but you're the closest thing to an adult between the two of you, so keep him in line."

" _Attention. Attention. The arcade will open in ten minutes. Please report to your games._ "

"Yeah, yeah," Ralph muttered. Then, with a wave, he said, "See you two around. I'll give you a tour of the stump when you visit."

The wrecker walked away, covering the distance in one stride that would take Taffyta five or six. "I will!" she called after him, belatedly realizing that his suggestion to her to keep King Candy in line hadn't really been a suggestion at all—not to mention, it really had required a response. She felt like kicking herself. Her dumb silence had probably ratcheted up his suspicion of them a few notches.

Watching Ralph go, King Candy said. "Wow. I pride myself on expecting most things, but I didn't expect that."

Taffyta glanced at him. "You don't always expect the important things."

"Oh? Like what?"

With a smirk, she said, "Like how much you like me. No _way_ did you plan for that when you—well, when you took over the game."

He gave a surprised laugh. "I—well no. That wasn't part of the plan, I have to admit."

Sobering, Taffyta looked away from him and twisted a strand of hair around her finger. "You didn't expect what happened six months ago, either. Ralph coming to the game, and Vanellope racing, and the reset. All of that."

King Candy snorted. "Now _that's_ where you're wrong, my dear. I'd been expecting to get caught ever since I got to _Sugar Rush_. I just didn't plan for every eventuality."

She could feel his eyes on the back of her head, and when she turned back around to face him, his arms were crossed over his chest. "'Cause you can't plan for everything," she said.

His eyes narrowed a little. "What I _think_ I hear you saying is that I can't possibly plan for everything were we to, oh, let's say, break into the code vault to alter the randomizer code?"

Why couldn't she be less obvious? The second he said this, she looked around furtively. Now, though, no one was paying attention to them at all. The few characters remaining were booking it from outlet to outlet. " _Attention. Attention. The arcade will open in five minutes. Please report to your games._ "

"I wasn't saying that," she said, wondering if this was actually true. Maybe her subconscious had made her blurt that out about not always being prepared exactly because she _was_ still thinking about it. And what a terrible, horrible idea it was. "But I _don't_ think you can plan for everything, and what if we get caught? That would be, like, really bad. Ralph just said you can visit his game! You don't want to mess that up, right?"

Instead of answering, King Candy stared into the distance, as Sonic zoomed from _Street Fighter II_ back to his own game. Taffyta thought she'd caught a flicker of…guilt on his face, but it was gone way too fast to really register it, let alone be sure what she'd seen.

" _Attention. Attention. The arcade is now open. Report to your games immediately_."

"You're not on the roster today, right Taff?" he asked. He knew her schedule as well as she did. This question was just a formality. She shook her head, and he raised an eyebrow at her. "What do you say we head back to your house, and I can tell you exactly how, if I _were_ planning on breaking into the code vault, I'd do it in a way that guaranteed success _and_ not getting caught?" When she gave him a flat look, he grinned. "Purely—hoo-hoo—hypothetical, of course. Just to see if I've still got the flair for pulling something like this off, you know."

The gleam in his eyes made her smile despite herself. "I'm pretty sure you do," she said.

He spun on his heel and bounced a few steps, then looked back at her and offered her his arm debonairly. Hypothetical. It was just hypothetical. Taking a deep breath, she walked forward and took his arm.


	7. Chapter 7

CHAPTER 7

Taffyta cranked her wheel hard to one side and came to a stop in a swirl of sugar dust. That was it—last race of the day. Thank coders. To call this day "the worst day of racing ever" was…okay, probably exaggerating, but not by much. She'd been by far the best racer on the roster, which was fun for the first couple hours, but after awhile got really tedious. The worst thing was that she _still_ hadn't won all the races. Horrible gamers had kept selecting her—well, why wouldn't they, when their other choices included Torvald and Citrusella? Even Swizz, who was _supposed_ to be good, had looked totally pathetic out there. And that was when he _wasn't_ player controlled.

So she'd cycled through a whole range of emotions throughout the day, beginning with boredom, then embarrassment, then misery, and now, finally, as the arcade closed and characters dropped their professional facades, anger.

Swizzle pulled up next to her as she was getting out of her kart, along with Citrusella and Torvald. Minty, parked a few feet away, looked embarrassed, and Adorabeezle didn't even stop. She only slowed enough for the other racers to jump out of her way before she sped off again. Taffyta crossed her arms over her chest and watched Adorabeezle speed through the town square, half-wishing she'd had the idea first. She'd just look like a copycat if she left now, though.

"Hey, good day today, Taffyta," Swizzle said.

"Um, excuse me?" she asked, her eyebrows raised to her hairline. "That was a _terrible_ day. Barely _anyone_ played, and what in pixie sticks was _up_ with your driving? No offense, Swizzle, but you looked pretty bad."

He looked unbothered by her criticism. "You never think anyone measures up to you. Except _Turbo_ , of course."

Ignoring the jibe, she put a hand on her hip and shot back, "Just because you're never gonna be as good as me doesn't mean you don't _try_. You looked like you hadn't raced since the last time you were on the roster!" Which had been days ago, from what she remembered.

Swizzle looked vaguely uncomfortable, but Torvald laughed. "That's because he hasn't! None of us have."

Taffyta turned slowly to look at her. "Uh, how about you define 'none of us,' Torvald," she said sweetly.

At that moment, Vanellope pulled up and hopped out of her kart, approaching them. Their president's approach didn't stop Torvald from going on, "Citrusella, Sticky, Nougetsia, Swizzle and me. And Gloyd and Crumbelina, sort of. I mean, _no one_ ever practiced as much as you, Taffyta, you've always been crazy. But we're all going to get on the roster no matter what now, because Vanellope made it random. So what's the point of practicing?"

There was a weird rushing sound in Taffyta's ears, and it took her several long seconds to realize it was the sound of rage pounding in her head. Her throat was tight with anger. This absurd, offensive question deserved a response so scathing that Taffyta couldn't even find the _words_ , and honestly even if she found the words, she wasn't sure she'd be able to get them out. _The point_ , she wanted to say, _is that we're supposed to take pride in what we do. The point_ _is that we're lucky to have the best jobs in the whole arcade. The_ point _is that some people aren't able to race, and none of us should take it for granted even for a single second._

But all that came out was, "Ugh!" She turned around and locked eyes with Vanellope, shooting her a look full of daggers and more than a little _I told you so_ , even though Taffyta _hadn't_ told her, had she? She'd just complained about the randomizer. Now was the time to have the conversation she'd been putting off about the Random Roster Race. Vanellope had heard Torvald just as well as she had—what's the point of practicing when you're going to be on the roster no matter what? It was the perfect in, and no better opportunity to have this very difficult conversation was going to present itself. If she was going to ask Vanellope to reinstitute the Random Roster Race, it should be right now.

For a long moment, she stood there frozen in rage and indecision. _Just do it._ Talk _to her!_ The worst Vanellope could say was no, right? And gamers knew she'd heard Vanellope say 'no' enough lately. One of these times it would probably even start to sting less.

She opened her mouth to speak.

Then she closed it. King Candy was the one who'd noticed how bad the recolors were racing. _And_ he had a plan to take care of it, too.

Without saying a word, she stalked away. She'd come back for her kart later. King Candy was supposed to be meeting her in the town square. They'd planned on going to _Fix-It Felix Jr._ tonight. Now she wasn't so sure she wanted to. Chances were Vanellope would be there, and even though Vanellope technically hadn't done anything, Taffyta was still mad at her. She didn't _have_ to use the randomizer. She could have gone back to the Random Roster Race. But she kept refusing to.

When Taffyta got to the town square, she found King Candy sitting on the brick wall of the fountain, flicking water at a couple of nervous NPCs every time their backs were turned. "Hey," she said, sitting down in a huff next to him.

"What, did you get third place?" he asked, raising an eyebrow.

"They don't _practice!_ " she said, her voice high with fury.

For a second, he looked confused, and then he laughed, binary flickering across him. She didn't know why, it wasn't like this was _funny_. It was the exact opposite of funny. She glared at him, which he ignored. "Of course they don't practice!" he said, still hooting with laughter. "Why should they? They'll be on the roster no matter what!"

Darkly, Taffyta said, "That's what Torvald said."

With a shrug, King Candy replied, "She's right. I mean, isn't she?" When he paused to look at her, one eyebrow raised, she just pouted and refused to respond. He shrugged again. "Why waste your time practicing when sthooner or later your name's coming up on that roster? There're better things to do, at least, you know, I imagine there are better things to do, when you're nine years old? What do you wish you were doing, if you weren't babysitting me?"

"I'd be _practicing_ ," Taffyta said. And then, realizing what he'd said, added, "And I'm not babysitting you. And I wouldn't rather be doing anything else!" She needed to get off this topic before she put her foot any further in her mouth. With a frustrated sigh, she went on, "But like, racing comes _first_. That's why I barely ever went out into the arcade before. I thought you knew that."

"I did," he said. He hesitated. "It's not like we got to be friends by accident, you know."

This cooled her anger somewhat, and she looked at him and smiled weakly. The whole reason they'd become friends in the first place was because he'd seen so much of himself in her. That was something that had been a source of pride before the reset, then a source of shame and fear after it. Now…well, it was probably closer to the former, but tinged with the darkness of the latter. Thinking about everything that had come before the reset could be depressing, but it could be pretty great, too. Their friendship was a double-edged sword. She hopped up on the wall to sit next to him and crossed her arms over her chest. "I just don't _get_ it," she said. "Racing's like, the greatest thing _ever_. It's what we're all meant to be doing. How can they just…not care?"

He leaned back on his hands and jiggled his foot, the gumdrop on his shoe jingling. "Oh, I'm sure they care. It's in all our code. It's just, they don't care _as much_. And when you care as much as, well, _you_ do, my dear, or as I do, then anything much less than that looks like not caring at all."

She huffed. "Sounds like you're defending them."

That made him laugh again. "Well that's—hoo-hoo—that's a shame, really, because I'm not. It would ruin my image, don't you think? You know, big, bad Turbo, defending a bunch of children? _Please._ " He glanced at her, an eyebrow arched, but he didn't say anything else.

Taffyta sighed with a puff of air and slouched her shoulders. She shouldn't ask what she was about to ask. She knew that. It was a Very Bad Idea. In her self-aware moments, Taffyta knew she wasn't exactly the queen of great ideas in the best of times, and this wasn't the best of times. And that meant she should keep her mouth shut. _Don't make stupid, rash decisions._ That was how you messed stuff up. That was how you got your game unplugged.

She was still for a long moment. Then, she asked, "Do you…do you still think we'd be able to…you know."

His eyebrow was still raised. "I'm not sure I do."

Looking around, she leaned closer to him and said, "The code. Do you still think we could pull it off? Make a big enough distraction so you could get into the code vault and change it?"

"Pfft, Taffyta. I _know_ we can pull it off." His eyes gleamed and he drew one leg up, propping his heel on the edge of the wall. "Can I take this to mean you finally see the wisdom of making those minor alterationsth?"

Her heart gave a sickening flutter and something in her screamed not to agree to this. But then she remembered the smug look on Torvald's face as she'd said they didn't have to practice, and Swizzle smirking like he'd just figured out something really clever. Like he was _so_ smart. "Yeah," she said. "We need the Random Roster Race again. They're just gonna get worse and worse, and fewer and fewer gamers are gonna play…"

And she could just see it now. Pretty soon there'd be hardly anyone playing at all, and Litwak would decide _Sugar Rush_ wasn't making enough money to justify the electricity bill. And he'd pull their plug, just like that. No fanfare, no like, wailing and gnashing of teeth about the game being broken. Just a boring game that no one played anymore reaching the end of its life. The thought made her ill.

King Candy shot to his feet, intensity warring with delight on his face. Taffyta didn't know what she felt, she only knew that she had to do _something_. There were obviously enough racers in this game that didn't care, and Vanellope either didn't care herself or wasn't willing to do anything about it. She'd only been president for six months. Maybe she just couldn't handle a crisis. When the virus had gotten into the game three months ago—when Taffyta had brought it back, she reminded herself—Vanellope had dealt well with that. But this was different. This wasn't something you handled all at once, where you made a decision and it was either right or wrong. This required finesse, and dealing with people, and maybe making some of them unhappy.

Taffyta thought about that. The _last_ thing Vanellope wanted to do was make anyone unhappy. And now that she thought about it, it was obvious. That was what the randomizer was all about—not making anyone feel left out. Not making anyone feel bad, like she'd felt for so long. And that was the thing that King Candy had always understood about being a leader. You couldn't make everyone happy all the time.

She caught herself before she followed that train of thought any farther. King Candy had taken over the game, reprogrammed it, tried to rip out Vanellope's code, and locked up all their memories. She shouldn't have been thinking about what a great leader he'd been.

Even if, a traitorous part of her insisted, he totally _had_ been.

There was a grin on his face, and that made it way too easy to push her misgivings aside. "Excthellent! Do you want to go over my plan here or back at your place?"

"You…you already have a plan?" she asked.

He flicked his wrist. "Taffyta, please. I came up with a plan before we got back from Game Central Station the other night."

"Oh." Taffyta blinked, then crossed her arms over her chest. "Why didn't you tell me?"

Shrugging and rocking back on his heels, King Candy said, "Well, I couldn't be sure you were completely sold on the idea." He raised an eyebrow. "In fact I was pretty sure you _weren't_."

"It's not like I was going to tattle on you or something," she said, feeling just a little bit offended. After everything they'd been through, how could he think she'd do something like that?

He looked surprised, and a glitch rippled up him, but he maintained his form. Now that she thought about it, he seemed to be switching back and forth between King Candy and Turbo less and less, and it seemed correspondingly more and more deliberate when he did. "Of course not," he said. "Why would I—? I just didn't want you to feel…well, I don't know, like you had to go along with it. If you didn't want to, that is. I didn't really think you did, I mean, you said no to it about three hundred times."

"It wasn't _three hundred_ ," she grumbled.

"Hyperbole is one of my very best qualities, Taff," he said with a grin. Then, he sobered. "I just, you know, didn't want to pressure you. Your normally sterling judgement is clouded with an unfortunate affection for the glitch."

She ignored this. "Were you just going to do all of it without me, then?" she asked.

"Don't be silly." His mouth twitched. "My plan requires two people."

She looked around at the town square to make sure no one had heard this. None of the racers was there, but some of their fans were. Some of Taffyta's were, too, looking at her with a mixture of worship and nervousness. When she was with King Candy, none of them ever approached her. But she didn't really trust them anymore, anyway. _She_ wouldn't tattle on him, but her fans definitely would.

"Let's go home," she said. Then, she realized what she'd said. It was her home, not his. Or did he consider it home, too? Even though he'd only been there a few weeks, her house would seem empty without him there.

He didn't have any reaction to this at all, though. With a slow smile spreading across his face, he said, "Let's take your kart. The faster we figure everything out, the better."


	8. Chapter 8

CHAPTER 8

"This is crazy."

"Which part?"

Taffyta stared at the papers strewn all over the floor, full of scribbled notes, drawings, and diagrams of varying legibility. "All of it," she replied. "There's no way we can possibly pull this off! Especially in—" She pulled a stack of papers towards her and riffled through it until she found the one she was looking for, then finished, "—fifteen minutes? This is like, the most complicated thing I've ever seen." She turned the paper towards him. There was a list of steps, with arrows drawn to flip their order, numbers crossed out, and something written sideways up the edge of the page that she doubted he'd even be able to read at this point. "How would we do it so fast?"

King Candy was laying on his stomach on the floor, sketching something on a blank sheet of paper. Without looking up, he said, "No other way to do it. From start to finish, it'll take thirteen and a half to seventeen minutes." Glancing at her—and the paper that she was still holding up—he added, "I only need three minutes to get into the code vault, find the code, and change it. Four, topsth."

Running a hand through her hair, Taffyta put the sheet of paper down on top of the stack and asked, "What if I can't do all this other stuff fast enough? What if you get caught and it's my fault?"

"Don't get caught," he said with a grin.

She pouted. "I'm _serious_."

With one eyebrow raised, he said, "So am I." He put the pencil down and planted his elbow on the floor, propping his head on the heel of his hand. "Look, we'll go through it, okay? You'll be fine. I have the utmostht faith in you."

Laughing humorlessly, Taffyta repeated, "Go through it? It's not like we can do a dry run of this."

Without taking his eyes off her, he said, "No, so listen, a verbal dry run's going to have to be good enough. Right? Let's start. First step, go."

Her mind went blank and she froze. Even though they'd spent the last three hours talking this through, planning, taking notes, finalizing this totally kookoo for cocoa puffs scheme, she couldn't remember how it started. And the first part was hers, too. What if when they went to do this for real, she forgot the very beginning of it?

"The castle," he prompted.

Pieces clicked together in her mind. "Oh! Oh yeah, that's right! We go to the castle right before the guard rotation for the camera room. I stall the guard coming on for his shift while you go to the camera room."

"Good, excellent, that's right." The camera room had been a new addition after the game had reset. Surge had suggested it, if Taffyta's casual eavesdropping was correct. The code there was separate from the code vault and it had been set up that way as an extra security measure. This way, if King Candy wanted to get into the code vault, he had to find a way to get around the separate security cameras. "Say whatever you have to to keep him occupied," King Candy went on. "Then _I_ sneak into the camera room, do some basic coding, and set the cameras to play a loop of the last uneventful hour."

Clearly Surge and Vanellope hadn't thought much about how easy it would be for King Candy to circumvent this failsafe. Or maybe they just hadn't counted on someone helping him to do it. The cameras were trained on the code vault at all times, so all they needed to do was put their plan into action at a time when they knew Vanellope had been outside the throne room for the past hour. And considering how little time she spent there, between racing during the day and hanging out with Ralph at night, that wouldn't be hard.

She took a deep breath and looked at the window. Should they have drawn the curtains? "That's the easy part, though. After we rig the cameras, that's when I might mess up." When she stopped, twisting a strand of hair around her finger nervously, he motioned with a hand for her to go on. Setting her shoulders, she said, "Then I put on your Turbo jumpsuit and helmet and steal Vanellope's kart."

As soon as the words left her mouth, she buried her face in her hands. It sounded _horrible_ , it sounded like a terrible idea, and yet, even with her fingers digging into her eyebrows, even with her heart thrumming with fear, she couldn't bring herself to put a stop to it. They _had_ to get rid of the randomizer. It was bad for their game. If she let things go on like this, it was going to end with _Sugar Rush_ getting unplugged. She knew that so deep in her code that she felt like she'd been programmed with the knowledge.

King Candy nodded, a small smile on his face. "Once you do that, you'll get everyone in Game Central Station scrambling." Holding up one of the pieces of paper with a diagram on it, he said, "And then you activate this."

Tucking a piece of hair behind her ear, she leaned forward and studied it. The page was split into two halves, and on one was a drawing of a box with a button on it. A cross section on the other half showed the box split open, with some kind of circuit board inside and wires criss-crossing the cavity. "Right…this. Explain this to me again?"

He pointed at the cross section. "Thisth will contain a fragment of my code. There'll be a _teeny_ tiny transmitter inside, very limited range so this part is important, you _need_ to get within a certain radius of an outlet entrance."

Taffyta continued staring at the diagram. "And you need me to crash."

"Unless you have a better idea of how to cause the maximum amount of disruption."

Shaking her head, she said, "Not really." Of the two of them, he was probably the expert on big, dramatic scenes designed to get everyone's attention. "So I drive through Game Central Station and make as much of a scene as possible and everybody thinks I'm you. Everyone who the arcade's trained to deal with you game-jumping—" King Candy scoffed, "—is going to rush in to stop me. That'll include the Oreo guard in the throne room whose job is to watch the code vault."

"Luckily most of them have no idea that not only are you the best racer in this game—currently, of course, seeing as how I'm not allowed within one hundred feet of any starting line—you _also_ happen to be pretty killer at the art of the controlled crash." He raised an eyebrow. "I taught you that."

She shrugged. "I improved on what you taught me."

"Hoohoohoo!" He rocked back, kicked his feet out in mirth, and caught himself on his hands before he fell backwards. "That'sth my girl."

Her eyes returned to the diagram. "Once I crash, I can activate this…button thing with your code in it. Everyone will panic when the alarm goes off on whatever game I'm closest to, and while everyone's freaking out between the crash and what they think is you game-jumping, I change out of your dorky jumpsuit and sneak away."

"I'll ignore the sartorial slight," he said, leaning on one hand. She smirked. "While you're doing all that, I'll go into the code vault. By the time you get back, I should be halfway back to the house."

Something niggled at her memory. "The code vault…didn't Vanellope say something about you not knowing the code to get in?"

"Oh, that." He waved his hand dismissively and said, "You know, the glitch _really_ isn't that tech savvy. She needs to learn to hide passwords better. I saw her enter the whole thing when I fixed the game three months ago."

Her eyes widening in surprise, she said, "You've known the code to get in this whole time?"

Chuckling, he replied, "Played that close to my chest, didn't I? Well, you know, no point in saying anything. I never knew if it would come in handy."

She watched him for a minute. Too bad no one except her would ever know he could have gotten into the code vault this entire time. Maybe it would have counted for something with all of them. Then again, maybe not. It didn't seem to occur to him that this was something he should be proud of, but…well, _she_ was proud of him.

When she'd been silent for another minute, King Candy cleared his throat and raised his eyebrows at her. Taffyta still hesitated before she spoke. This plan—this nutso plan—actually sounded like it could work. That might have been the craziest thing of all. Leaning forward and wrapping her hands around her shoes, she said, "Okay, but there's just one other thing. How are we going to deal with the fact that everyone will think you stole Vanellope's kart and tried to game-jump?"

Flicking a hand, he said, "Oh, I'll talk my way out of that."

"No offense, but I'm not sure you have the cred to talk your way out of anything." After chewing at her lip for a second, she added, "The last thing I want is for you to get locked up in the fungeon _again_. I don't know if Vanellope would let you out."

She couldn't stand that. After the months of begging that it had taken to get him released in the first place, and all the awkwardness of the pain of him trying to just…to just… _exist_ in the arcade now, for him to get thrown back in the fungeon was unthinkable. The Random Roster Race wasn't worth that. Running a hand through her hair, she said, "I don't know about any of this if it means you get locked up again."

There was a look of surprise on his face, as though it was shocking that she'd put his well-being above anything else. "I'll say I was bored." With a shrug, he added, "And that the alarm was too sensitive for whatever game you set off. Blaming Surge is alwaysth a sure bet. You know, tell them I didn't want to game jump, I just got…stir-crazy in here."

"Stir-crazy?" she repeated doubtfully. "I don't know. Do you think anyone will buy that?"

"Well, maybe try not to crash anywhere near a racing game." He shot her a grin. "In fact, now that I think about it, maybe try to make it something I've demonstrated absolutely no interest in visiting."

Raising her eyebrows, she asked, "Like _Virtua Cop_?"

He rolled his eyes. "Exthactly. Why anyone would want to play that, let alone visit it in their off-hours, is beyond me. Oy. What a nightmare game."

She kept chewing her lip. "I guess you've made it pretty obvious how stupid you think it is. That Janet lady tried to throw a punch at you last time you were bad-mouthing it."

Holding up a hand, he said, "Oh, actually, that was because I told her without the body armor she'd have a great figure—what? After Sergeant Psychopath I have a phobia of women in kevlar, what can I say?"

Taffyta made a face. "Gross."

"Y'know, I would say someday you'll understand that sort of thing, but I sthuppose you won't. That whole being a nine-year-old forever."

" _Gross_."

With a laugh, King Candy said, "Okay, okay, point taken. We'll stay off the subject of my romantic conquests. Or, you know, lack thereof since _Sugar Rush_ reset."

" _GROSS!_ " Taffyta shuddered. "Just…stop. Ew. _Yuck._ I don't wanna hear about it. Let's just…get back to sneaking into the code vault, reprogramming the game, and breaking every rule in the arcade." Betraying everything and everyone in Litwak's suddenly felt a lot less horrifying if it meant she didn't have to hear about King Candy and…and… _girls._ It hadn't ever occurred to her that he might have had, like, a girlfriend. Or a boyfriend. Or, oh god, like, maybe _more than one_. This was an aspect of her friend that she'd never once considered, and she wanted nothing more than to never consider it again.

Shaking herself, she said, "Okay, fine, I'll do my best to crash over by _Virtua Cop_. It's all the way over by _Tapper's_ and _Space Invaders_ so that should give you plenty of time to get into the code vault."

"Good." He shot her a grin. "I know you can do it."

She couldn't help but smile at the praise. "I mean, I _am_ the best racer in the game."

"Better not let the glitch hear you say that."

With a scowl, Taffyta said, "Yeah, well, she has an unfair advantage. And it's Vanellope, by the way."

"Hoohoohoo! You're slipping, Taff. Took you a whole five secondsth to correct me, there." King Candy stood up and stretched his arms over his head, yawning widely. "Anyway, I'd say that's an excthellent night's work, wouldn't you?"

Taffyta stretched her legs out in front of her, knocking her shoes together. "I guess. But…there's kind of one thing we didn't decide." When King Candy raised an eyebrow, she said, "When we're doing this."

He picked up one of the sketches. "Good point. Not tomorrow."

"Oh my god, no!" Taffyta said, panic flooding through her at the thought.

Smiling at her slightly, as if he could tell she was just on the verge of freaking out—what was she thinking, of course he could; it's not like she was subtle—he made a paper airplane out of the sketch. "Give me a couple days to write the code and build this little thing-a-ma-jig. That's the technical term, you know."

He sent the paper airplane sailing through the air and she caught it as it went by her. "Okay," she said. Then, she sighed, the paper airplane dropping to her side and crumpling against her dress.

"What?"

"Oh, it's just…ugh." Her conscience was poking her, that was what it was. Now that she'd decided to do this, her conscience was just a stupid inconvenience. "I have to ask Vanellope about the Random Roster Race," Taffyta sighed. "She's probably gonna say no, but…I have to ask."

To her surprise, King Candy didn't say anything to this. He just smiled crookedly, with a hint of acerbity in his expression. "Two days," he said.

Taffyta drew in a breath. "Two days."

* * *

She figured she'd spend the next two days stewing until she finally worked up the nerve to talk to Vanellope, but a surprise arrived just before the arcade opened the next morning. Taffyta was in the kitchen, absently popping marshmallows into her mouth for breakfast, when she heard the door open and close. Popping her head around the cabinets, she saw King Candy waving an envelope.

"Hand-delivered," he said. Taffyta's gaze flicked to the window, where she could see Candlehead with her nose pressed against the glass, mouthing something that looked like _see you soon!_ Taffyta waved and stifled a giggle, remembering that Candlehead was on the roster today, too. As the other girl skipped off, King Candy shook his head and said, "You know, every now and then it occurs to me how _strange_ she is."

With a shrug, Taffyta said, "I guess. What's that?"

Tossing it to her, he said, "It'sth addressed to you."

Mail! She'd never gotten _mail_ before. With a delighted squeal, she tore the envelope open and pulled out the contents. It was an invitation, on fancy paper, with loopy cursive writing and everything. "Felix and Calhoun are having a housewarming party," she said, surprised. Not like she'd had, like, a preconceived notion of what this invitation was going to be for, but this wasn't what she'd expected, even so.

"Oh?"

"It's for both of us," she said, flipping it around and holding it towards him. "You're invited too!" A grin lit her face. There, proof that not everyone in the arcade hated him! "It's tonight, we're going, right?"

He glitched to Turbo and fiddled with the zipper on his jumpsuit. "I…think I'm going to skip it. But you should go."

With an exasperated huff, she said, "No way. You _have_ to come! You're invited!"

"Pretty sure getting an invitation doesn't make attendance mandatory." He glitched back. "Anyway, justht because I'm on there doesn't mean I'm really welcome."

She stuck her lip out. "Don't be stupid."

Raising an eyebrow, he said, "Well, I try not to be."

"Okay, then come to Felix and Calhoun's thing. It—" She'd been about to say, _It'll be good for you to go somewhere besides the same boring old places_ , but she caught herself and instead said, "It'll be fun." When he just looked at her, she dropped her arms to her sides, the invitation clutched in one hand, and gave him an exasperated look. "King Candy, come _on_."

He laughed. "Okay, all right, fine, if it meansth that much to you. Now, don't you have a starting line to be at?"

"Oh, _sugar_." She glanced at the clock, grabbed another handful of marshmallows, and bolted out the door, yelling as she went, "See you later, we'll go to the party after the arcade closes!"

And Taffyta wasn't going to take no for an answer on that invitation. No _way_ was he going to change his mind. If he did, she'd just…make some really, super great argument about why they should go, and he wouldn't be able to resist her logic.

Oh, who was she kidding. She'd just cry.

In the end, he didn't fight her when the arcade closed. He was waiting for her in the stands looking resigned and unenthused, but at least he didn't try to convince her not to go or to go without him. It was possible that the look of determination on her face was enough to dissuade him from attempting it. He even suffered the indignity of riding on the back of her kart again on the trip out to Game Central Station.

Nobody wanted to sit near them on the train to _Fix-It Felix, Jr._ , not that Taffyta was surprised. He stuttered with red binary and glitched to Turbo, plonking his elbow on the side of the car and glaring at the front of the train, where Sonic was sitting and pretending he didn't see them. "I can't believe I let you convince me to come to this," he grumbled.

Considering the sour look on his face, she couldn't quite believe it either. "It could be fun," she said.

"Mmph." He pulled his helmet down over his eyes, then took it off his head entirely and stared at it critically, picking at an apparently nonexistent smudge on the front. Taffyta stared. Had she ever seen him take his helmet off? Underneath was a shock of black hair. His eyes flicked towards her, and he jammed the helmet back on. "Sure, it might be fun. And the glitch might make me vice president."

The train creaked around a bend in the tunnel and slowly rolled into the station in _Fix-It Felix, Jr._ , dinging to announce its arrival. Turbo sat in the train for a second, staring up at the Niceland Apartment Building, before looking at her and opening his mouth to say something. She put a hand on her hip and cocked her head until he moved, muttering something under his breath.

They trooped into the building and up to the apartment without speaking, including while they waited for the elevator with Sonic. Taffyta would have liked to say she couldn't imagine a more awkward silence, but she figured that was probably selling future moments like this one short.

Finally, the elevator came, and once it arrived on Felix and Calhoun's floor, Sonic sped off. "We don't have to stay that long," Taffyta said, like she was conceding something.

He glitched back to King Candy, looked at her, but didn't respond to this. Instead, he produced a glass bottle from somewhere within his tailcoat and said, "By the way, I assume you're fine if I say this isth from both of us? You don't seem to have brought a gift." When she clapped her hands over her mouth in horror, he chuckled and said, "So I'll take that as a yes?"

"I can't believe I forgot a present!" she squeaked. "And where did you get that? Is that _wine_?"

With a sly smile, he said, "Yes well, you know, I possibly have a stash up at the castle that our Brat-in-Chief hasn't managed to find. And before you say anything," he added, holding up a hand, "I didn't sneak into the castle, I just _nicthely_ asked Sour Bill to get it for me, and, hoo-hoo, yes I know, it's _Vanellope_."

"Sour Bill did you a favor?" she asked doubtfully.

"After I told him I'd buy him his next ten root beers from _Tapper's_. "

They turned the corner and saw Sonic knocking on Felix and Calhoun's door, and Taffyta remarked, "A stash of actual, real alcohol isn't very E-rated."

With a grin, King Candy said, "Oh, the obvious joke here is that I was living in a game with fourteen perpetual children—and the glitch, I mean, what a headache—anyone would need a drink in that situation." When she just looked at him, he laughed and said, "Look, it fell off the truck in _American Pro Trucker_. And I don't mean that in, you know, a shady sense; it _literally_ fell off the truck, there were a bunch of broken bottles, huge wine pond in the middle of the freeway; it was a giant mess and they put out the word that they were just trying to unload all of it before the arcade opened."

Sonic glanced over at them and for a second Taffyta thought he was going to say something, like maybe he had something to add to this story. It was moments like this that she hoped reminded the other characters that King Candy had been part of the fabric of the arcade once. Then the apartment door opened and the moment was gone.

"Well, hi there, Sonic!" Felix's voice said, followed by his head poking out from the door. When he caught sight of Taffyta and King Candy, his face cycled through several emotions, the most obvious of which was shock. "You made it," he said. Or was it more like, _you_ made it? Or you _made_ it?

Taffyta couldn't decide, so she just chirped, "Yep!"

Luckily, Felix was smiling. "Well, I'll be a monkey's uncle. Come on in!"

Sonic twitched forward, then stopped, cleared his throat, and said, "Go ahead, guys."

With a slight glitch of red and a disdainful look in Sonic's direction, King Candy entered the apartment, Taffyta right on his heels. A warm bubble of chatter enveloped her and a quick look around told her that besides Vanellope, they were the only characters from _Sugar Rush_ there. She guessed that was a compliment, but like…it was also a little weird. Taffyta didn't exactly have a super special relationship with Felix or Calhoun. Well, except if you counted that Felix had kind of been in charge of getting her better after she'd gone Turbo and brought the virus back to _Sugar Rush_ , but that was more of a reason for _her_ to invite him over, not the other way around.

"Here, this is for you," King Candy said, holding the bottle of wine out to Felix like he couldn't care less. "Congratsth on living in such close proximity to a homicidal maniac."

Felix looked sincerely touched, and also unaffected by the barb, which Taffyta was kind of impressed by. "Why, thank you, Turbo! Or, gosh-all-Potomac, I should've asked—would you rather go by King Candy?"

He blinked. "Er, it doesn't matter."

It was hard not to giggle at the befuddled look on King Candy's face, but she managed not to. Felix ushered them in, pointing them around the corner to the kitchen, where food was laid out on the counter and the central island. Taffyta had been here once before, right before last Christmas. Then, there'd been a big, beautiful Christmas tree in one corner of the living room. Now that spot was taken up by an end table with a lamp sitting on it. The rest of the apartment looked the way she remembered it, spacious but cozy. The couch and two chairs in the living room were all occupied by other guests, and more were milling around the coffee table, where there were several bottles of wine and a bowl of punch.

"Real mid-century modern in here, isn't it?" King Candy observed. "Must be Felix's touch; it's hard to imagine the sergeant there having much in the way of style."

Taffyta glanced over to where he'd just indicated, seeing Calhoun deep in conversation with Ralph and Vanellope, who was perched on the wrecker's soldier. "I don't know," Taffyta said. "At least she's wearing normal clothes right now."

Vanellope looked around and spotted them at that moment, waving to Taffyta and making sure to shoot a glare at King Candy. The rest of the characters at the party were giving them as wide a berth as possible, though they were still closer to him than they wanted to be. The only person that made direct eye contact with either of them, besides Vanellope, was one of the soldiers from _Hero's Duty_ , what was his name? Kohut, yeah. He was looking at them and—oh. He was looking at them like they needed to be watched. Taffyta sighed.

Heading into the living room to pour himself a glass of punch, King Candy asked over his shoulder, "Having fun yet?"

She caught up with him and muttered, "At least no one's throwing anything at us."

"True." He took a sip of punch, his eyes roving across the room and taking in the other characters. Deanna, Mary, and Ms. Pac-Man had all frozen with, in Deanna's case, her glass of wine raised halfway to her lips. Across the room, Sorceress was whispering to Zangief, who was sitting on the arm of one of the chairs. The only sound in the living room came from the other chair, where the _Pong_ paddles were slowly bouncing a ball between them.

"Don't let me interrupt," King Candy said in a withering tone.

 _Boink. Boink. Boink._ Ms. Pac-Man shifted uneasily on the couch and Mary looked at the ceiling, clearing her throat. Ugh, why did everything have to be like this? Feeling miserable and trying to fight it, Taffyta reached for a cup and the punch ladle, only to yelp when King Candy snatched the little plastic goblet out of her hand. "What was that for?" she demanded.

"You're nine years old, and _that_ isth liberally spiked with rum," he said sternly. "Listen, just because I'm an evil game-jumper doesn't mean I'm going to allow any underage drinking."

There was a noise almost like a snicker, and Taffyta tried to figure out where it had come from. Was Zangief scratching his nose to hide a smile?

"Oh," a voice said behind them, " _you're_ here." Both King Candy and Taffyta turned around. A short man in a blue cardigan and slacks was standing there, swirling his drink around in a martini glass.

King Candy raised an eyebrow. A not-very-nice smile was twitching at his mouth. He may have looked like King Candy at the moment, but that smile was pure Turbo. "Now _that_ is the sort of astute observation that must have gotten you elected mayor of this place, Gene."

"Oh, _you're_ Gene!" Taffyta exclaimed, remembering that Ralph and Felix had said he held the power over whether or not King Candy was allowed into _Fix-It Felix, Jr._ Considering the disdainful expression on his face, she was surprised he'd agreed to it.

The Nicelander turned his head to look at her, peering down his nose in a way that made her instantly defensive. "I see Turbo's keeping company at his own maturity level. _Why_ Felix insists on inviting children to these things, I'll never understand."

"Probably because they're more fun than _you_ , Gene," Ralph suddenly said, approaching from the kitchen. He had to slouch a little to keep from scraping his head against the ceiling. "Hey, shouldn't you find a target that's more challenging, anyway? Picking on kids and the guy that everyone already hates, that's kind of low-hanging fruit."

Gene rolled his eyes and his mustache twitched. Taffyta was already staring at it—it was so bristly! How had she never paid any attention to this guy? Well, maybe it wasn't much of a mystery; he was exactly the kind of boring, stuffy adult that she ignored, and his tone made her wish King Candy had let her get a drink, only so she could accidentally-on-purpose spill it on his stupid, expensive looking sweater. "Don't you have to like, change your adult diaper or something?" she drawled.

Ralph snorted with laughter and Gene glared, brushing past her and King Candy to go talk to the Nicelanders on the couch. Once he was gone, Ralph said, "Hey, kid, there's some more age-appropriate drinks in the kitchen. You want something? I can make a plate up for you too, if you want."

"What, nothing for me?" King Candy asked.

"You can get your own food, Puffy-Pants," Ralph said cheerfully.

Craning her neck around Ralph's bulk to look towards the kitchen, Taffyta asked, "What's in there?"

Gesturing, Ralph said, "Oh, you know, the usual." Actually, Taffyta didn't know, since she'd never been to a Felix-and-Calhoun party before, but she nodded as though she did. "A bunch of fiddly food you have to eat with a toothpick, and—"

There was a garbled glitching sound, and Vanellope appeared at his side, "And that makes Stinkbrain here look _really_ dainty, like, tea party level dainty. I'm pretty sure you were sticking your pinky out while you were eating that tiny hotdog."

"It's a _cocktail sausage_ ," Gene snapped as he made his way past them again, his martini glass now empty.

Ralph winked at Vanellope and Taffyta, then said, "Well? What do you say, you hungry?"

Her stomach growled right at that moment, and Taffyta realized she hadn't eaten all day, except the handfuls of candy she'd grabbed now and then between quarter alerts. With a nod, she followed Ralph, with Vanellope skipping along beside him. To her surprise, King Candy stayed where he was, sipping at his punch and staring around the apartment with hooded eyes.

"Nobody thought you two would show," Ralph said as he grabbed her a plate and started piling food on it. "What do you want, deviled eggs? These pointless, tiny sandwiches? Sushi? Some stale bread with salsa on it?"

Vanellope giggled. "That's bruschetta, Ralph."

"Yeah, yeah, I know. I almost broke a tooth on it." He looked over the counter and said, "Here, how about this brie and jam thing, this looks good, ooh, and you need a tiny quiche, and some of this, some of…uh, whatever _this_ is, and here you go." He handed the plate to Taffyta, which was piled high with food and so heavy that she almost dropped it.

"Thanks," she said, standing as still as she could to keep the whole delicate construction from tumbling over. There was an olive teetering on the top of the food tower, and if she moved, it was going to fall for sure. "And duh, of course we'd come. Why did everyone think we wouldn't?" She'd just leave out the fact that King Candy had been…um, strongly opposed.

Vanellope rolled her eyes. "Because Turbutt's an antisocial jerk."

When Taffyta looked at Ralph, pouting, he shrugged and said, "I mean, yeah. That's basically it."

Carefully, Taffyta picked the olive off the food tower she was holding. Did she even like olives? She popped it in her mouth and made a face. _Ew_ , no. Normally she'd just have spit it out, but she forced herself to chew and swallow. Gross, it was like eating an old tire or something. "I don't even get why Felix and Calhoun invited us."

"Me either," Vanellope muttered.

Ralph grabbed a mini quiche from the counter, popped it into his mouth, and then said, "You'll have to ask Felix."

Taffyta looked at King Candy, still standing by himself drinking punch. There was a defiant cast to his eyebrows, like he was just daring anybody to start something with him. Maybe she was the only one who could see that, though. Making sure her plate was balanced, she carefully raised a hand to wave him over.

As he was making his way towards the kitchen, however, Felix intercepted him, smiling brightly like King Candy was exactly the person he wanted to talk to. Maybe he was, Taffyta thought, as she tilted her head and watched King Candy grudgingly engage in the conversation. In the meantime, she looked back to Ralph and Vanellope and said, "I figured it would be good for him to like, have a change of scene."

"Must be nice for you to have something else to do, too," Ralph said.

The pile of food on her plate wobbled and she stared hard at it, as though by sheer force of will she could keep it standing. "Um, not really," she said absently, wondering which piece of food she could extract that wouldn't affect the stability of the structure. "I like _Sugar Rush_. I don't mind spending most of my time there." The quiche, for sure, she decided. The deviled egg seemed like it was fusing the whole midsection of the food tower together. She pulled the quiche out slowly, holding her breath, and let out a sigh when she successfully removed it. Taking a bite, she said around a mouthful of buttery crust, "But I mean, it's nice Felix and Calhoun invited us. I like parties."

Huh, Felix was still talking to King Candy. Actually, King Candy seemed to be…talking _with_ him? His fingers were fidgeting around his punch cup, but she caught a quick flash of a smile on his face as Felix said, "Remember that time the guys from _Asteroids_ said you weren't much of a racer because all you ever did was drive around an oval track?"

And at that, the nascent smile on King Candy's face turned into a laugh—a genuine, delighted laugh. "I told them to pick the hardest track they could come up with and they chose _Pac-Man_."

With a chuckle, Felix said, "Boy, were they ever surprised when you raced around that entire level without hitting a single wall."

Taffyta smiled to herself and turned back to the conversation with Ralph and Vanellope. Maybe tonight wasn't going to be the totally awkward, miserable night she'd been afraid it was going to be, after all.


	9. Chapter 9

CHAPTER 9

It was practically five in the morning by the time they got home, Taffyta yawning widely as they walked through the door and trying to say in the same breath, "But like, did you know Calhoun could do all those impressions?"

"I _will_ admit, that wasth a surprise." King Candy drew her curtains shut, not like it mattered, since the constant lemon drop sunlight still streamed in from outside. "But, you know, I think she might have been a little drunk."

Taffyta looked at him, her eyes wide. "Really?" She'd never been around a drunk person before.

Chuckling, he said, "Don't tell her I noticed. She'd probably kill me."

She didn't bother arguing, because it might have been true. With another yawn, Taffyta went into the kitchen to grab a glass of water. She guessed she should go upstairs to try to get a few hours of sleep before the arcade opened.

"So," King Candy said. Taffyta turned to look at him as she gulped down her glass of water. He crossed his arms over his chest, leaning against the wall in the living room. Suspicion masked as nonchalance was radiating off him. "Felix was being awfully… _nice_ to me tonight."

Taffyta clunked her glass down and picked up a bon-bon from the kitchen table, wondering how long it had been sitting out and if it was still safe to eat. "Yeah?" she said distractedly.

"You don't find that just a little bit odd?"

"Not really," she said, inspecting the bon-bon for mold. It was unlike her to leave anything out, but she hadn't been the greatest at housekeeping lately. She knew King Candy hadn't done it; he left everything spotless. There didn't seem to be anything wrong with it, but she didn't have a clue how long it had been out, so just to be on the safe side, she tossed it in the garbage, then turned back around. He was watching her.

"What?" she asked.

His eyebrows were raised. "Felix. What's his angle?"

With a laugh, Taffyta said, "Felix? Felix doesn't have an _angle_. He's just nice." She went into the living room and plopped down on the couch. "He told me you guys used to be neighbors, back when the arcade first opened. Shouldn't you _know_ he's just friendly?"

"Yes, the—hoo-hoo—good old days." He fidgeted with the lapel of his jacket. "We _were_ neighbors," he admitted. "But we weren't friends. We were…well, I guess we were supposedto be, because, you know, we were both the stars of our games, but we never really got along." Making a face, King Candy said, "He was such a goody-two-shoes, you know, that whole aw-shucks schtick; it alwaysth kind of drove me crazy."

Suddenly, Taffyta didn't feel tired. King Candy hardly ever talked about when _TurboTime_ had still been plugged in, and she hardly knew anything about that time of his life. It was obvious he didn't talk about it because the memories hurt him. That whatever people thought about him, and however much he played it off like he didn't care, it was a wound that still hadn't healed. "So you never hung out with him?" she asked.

With a shrug, King Candy said, "I guess I did. Look, it was different back then; if you were a good guy you socialized with the good guys, and if you were a bad guy—well, if you were a bad guy you pretty much socialized with no one. So honestly, even if none of us liked each other—or, hoo-hoo, I guess really, even if no one liked _me_ , that was it. We were the in-crowd, I guessth, but, well, let's just say, there wasn't a lot of love lost when I stopped drinking root beers with them."

"They didn't like you?" Taffyta asked, wondering who exactly had been part of this "in-crowd" besides Felix. He hadn't volunteered that information, and she wasn't sure if she should ask.

"Not much has changed around here, as you can see," he said flippantly.

She tilted her head. This wasn't the first time he'd said that he'd never had any friends. His life must have been so lonely. It made her chest ache.

With a sigh, she got to her feet, then said, "I'm going to go to bed for a few hours." For a moment, she looked at him, and then, that same pain behind her sternum, she crossed the room and wrapped her arms around him.

King Candy didn't move for a few seconds, but then he patted her head awkwardly. "What was that for?" he asked when she let go of him.

She shrugged and walked to the stairs. "You just seemed like you needed it."

A glitch garbled his form as he stared at her. He opened his mouth to say something. Then, he glitched again and closed his mouth. "Good-night," he said, giving her a tiny salute.

Taffyta nodded and padded up the stairs. Only one more day before they put their plan into action, and she probably disappeared from the roster with King Candy's code change. She wanted to make it count so the gamers really knew what they were missing.

* * *

Ugh, why was it that when Taffyta needed her, Vanellope was always nowhere to be found? The arcade had closed after another mostly miserable day of racing, and it was now or never—Taffyta needed to ask Vanellope to turn the randomizer off.

She'd checked all over _Sugar Rush_ with no luck, even going so far as to ask Beard Papa, who she still hadn't forgiven for the way he'd talked about King Candy, if he'd seen her. No, he hadn't, but was Taffyta still hanging around that bad element? Sweet little racer like her should keep better company. She'd chucked her lollipop at him and he'd had to duck to keep from taking a strawberry dum-dum between the eyes.

Finally, she'd had to concede that the president probably wasn't in the game. She duly headed out to Game Central Station, where the first people she encountered were Crumbelina and Swizzle, playing baseball in the outlet entrance. They hadn't seen Vanellope.

"Are you looking for her?" Swizzle asked.

"Um, duh?" Taffyta said. "Why are you two doing this here, anyway?"

Crumbelina made a face. "Surge told us we're not allowed to play in GCS, 'cause it's _destructive_ and we gave Zangief a _concussion_. Whatever. He's just a buzzkill."

Normally Taffyta would have agreed and joined in for a round of Surge Protector abuse, but now she just said, "Okay, well, if you see Vanellope, tell her I'm looking for her."

"Sure," Swizz said. "Hey, sure you don't wanna play?"

He threw the gobstopper ball towards Crumbelina and she swung the bat so hard that it flew out of her hands and ricocheted off the wall, slamming into the train with such force that it dented the neon car.

"Uh, that's okay, but thanks for the offer," Taffyta said, heading out of the outlet towards Game Central Station. Dying outside _Sugar Rush_ hadn't ever seemed like much of a concern, but being within fifty feet of Crumbelina and Swizzle during this game suddenly made it seem like a definite possibility.

She didn't have much luck finding Vanellope out there, either. Of course, she had to be strategic about who she asked, since a good quarter of the arcade had shouted something nasty in her direction and/or tried to poor root beer on her in the past month. Donatello hadn't seen Vanellope, neither had Tron, or Paperboy, or Norwood. Finally, she asked Zombie, cringing away from his dribbling bodily fluids the whole time. "Vanellope, go! With Ralph. Burgers. Never bring any for Zombie. Errrrggghh."

"Soooo, _BurgerTime_ ," she said, inching backwards. "Thanks." Something pinkish dripped off him and she fled.

 _BurgerTime_ was close, at least, but the minute she stepped across the threshold into the outlet, a zap of blue electricity buzzed along the ground and Surge Protector materialized in front of her. "Are you _kidding_ me?" she groaned, yanking at her hair.

"Just a routine security check, miss," he said, clicking his pen and making a note on his clipboard.

She craned her neck and hopped up and down. "What are you writing?" She hadn't even done anything!

Adjusting his glasses and peering down at her, he asked, "Where are you headed, Miss Muttonfudge?" Instead of answering, she stared up at him, one hand on her hip and a flat look on her face. "Ah," Surge said. "I'll just put you down for the obvious, then. Are you traveling alone today?"

"Do you see anybody with me?" she snapped.

Raising his eyebrows, Surge scribbled something on his clipboard, muttering as he wrote, "Refuses to comply with questioning."

"Oh my god!"

She shoved past him, ignoring him as he yelled, "There's a limit on how many burgers you can bring out of there!"

Taffyta arrived at the _BurgerTime_ train to find Ralph and Vanellope getting out of it, and she was so relieved to have found the other girl that for a second, she forgot to be nervous about the upcoming conversation. At least this time, there wasn't much to be nervous about, because Taffyta already knew what Vanellope was going to say. _No._ The answer was always no. What was the point of getting nervous about something when you already knew the outcome?

Waving, she shouted, "Vanellope! I've been looking for you."

Vanellope glitched to her side and Taffyta tried not to jump. She was never going to get used to that, ever. It was one thing to see it, and hate it, on the track, but it was another when they were, well, literally anywhere else. "What's up, Taffyta?"

No beating around the gumdrop bush this time. Taffyta planted her feet squarely on the ground, drew herself up to her full height, tried to project confidence. "Vanellope, can we get rid of the randomizer and go back to the Random Roster Race? It's…it's just not working."

Instantly, Vanellope was on the defensive, and she glitched backwards a few steps. "Aw, c'mon, do we have to do this right now?"

Ralph crossed his arms over his chest and glanced at the president. "You want me to go, kid?"

"No way," Vanellope replied, eyeing Taffyta. "Because this isn't going to take long." With a frustrated noise, she said, " _No_ , Taffyta. The randomizer's fair, it's the only way—"

"Everyone gets a fair chance to race, yeah, I know." She'd heard it all before and it made her tone come out more sneering than she'd meant it to.

Glaring, Vanellope shot back, "I don't know what your problem is, you've been on the roster plenty!"

"Ugh, that isn't the point!" Taffyta said.

"Yeah, so what _is_ the point?" Vanellope demanded.

This had escalated way faster than Taffyta had meant it to. She took a deep breath to calm down. "I just don't…think it's working." Now she was repeating herself. Maybe it was time to cut her losses and end this conversation. Could she just walk away? Would that be too weird?

Shaking her head, Vanellope said, "Nope. N-O. Just because you don't like the randomizer doesn't mean there's anything wrong with it. C'mon, Ralph."

As she stormed past, Taffyta opened her mouth to respond. She almost said, _It's not just me, it's everyone, we_ all _hate it!_ But she bit her tongue. Bad enough that she was going to help King Candy break into the code vault. She didn't have to make Vanellope feel bad on top of it.

The two of them disappeared from view and Taffyta let her shoulders sag. Yet another failure. Though, was it really a failure when she'd already known in advance what the outcome would be? _Pretty philosophical, Taffyta_.

She hesitated in the station for a moment, not wanting to follow Ralph and Vanellope. It would look pathetic if she went trailing after them. Instead, she headed into _BurgerTime_ and ordered a bag of burgers to go, then stuffed it in her jacket to evade detection by Surge. To her relief, Vanellope and Ralph were nowhere to be seen in Game Central Station, and she booked it back to _Sugar Rush._

When she walked through the front door of her house, she found King Candy sitting at the kitchen table, hunched over a small electronic device. He glanced up at her as she approached and said, "Isth that _BurgerTime_ burgers I smell? You know they've got a really particular and distinctive odor of, I don't know, would you call it grease and dust? Maybe a dash of nostalgia…"

"Yeah, it is, and ew, you just made them sound really unappealing."

He shrugged as she put the bag down on the table. "At least it's less cliché as a secret ingredient than love, right?" Opening the bag, he breathed deeply and added, "Nothing quite like a _BurgerTime_ burger."

Taffyta grabbed one too and started eating, asking around a mouthful of bun, "So what's that?"

King Candy looked at the burger he was holding in one hand, then at the little box he'd been working on, which was now sitting on the table between his elbows. "Oh, this." He ate a few bites of burger. "You know, I forget how good these are." When Taffyta just raised her eyebrows, he picked up the device with his other hand and said, "This is what you're going to use to trick the sensors in Game Central Station into thinking I'm game-jumping."

When he held it out to her, she hesitantly took it. "This is it?"

"You say that like you were expecting something more exciting."

"I mean…a little bit." She slid it back across the table to him. It was just a plastic box, black with a single gray button. It was disappointingly light-weight. "Is it done?"

Taking another burger, he said, "Almost." Then, giving her a direct look, he said, "Let'sth do it tomorrow."

There was a twist in her stomach—a feeling equally of dread and excitement—and she squeaked, "Tomorrow?"

He held up two fingers. "I believe I specified two days and that would be, you know, tomorrow."

She stared at the device. "Yeah. I know."

Even though she wasn't looking at him, she could tell that he was staring at her. "Listen, Taffyta." When she didn't look up at him, he ducked his head so that he was in her field of vision. "You _do_ want to do this, right?"

"Yeah. Of course."

"Because if you _don't_ …" His eyes narrowed a little and he rested his elbows on the table, still holding her gaze. "Look. Taff. I need 100 percent buy-in on this. My plan— _our_ plan—kind of, sort of depends largely on _you_. So if you're having second thoughts…"

Quickly, she said, "No, I'm not. Seriously." When he raised an eyebrow doubtfully, she repeated, " _Seriously._ I just…I mean, it's kind of a big deal, isn't it? I'm just nervous." Taking a deep breath, she added, "But I want to do it. It's the best way to help the game. It's the best way to make Vanellope see that we have to bring the Random Roster Race back."

King Candy leaned back in his chair. "She said no, then."

"Huh?" Taffyta asked, startled.

"The glitch? You said you were going to ask her about it." He picked the little remote control up again and squinted at it. "Always figured it was going to be a waste but, hoo-hoo, these are the sortsth of life lessons you just have to learn for yourself."

"…Huh." Maybe that was true. It was hard to imagine Vanellope ever agreeing to any of Taffyta's requests ever again—like since she'd done her one favor, that meant Vanellope never had to listen to her again. Taffyta clenched her fists in her lap. "Tomorrow morning, after the arcade opens? Vanellope's not on the roster either."

With a grin, King Candy said, "Tomorrow morning."


	10. Chapter 10

CHAPTER 10

Taffyta and King Candy stood in the shadow of Sugar Rush castle, listening to the grumble of go-karts in the distance. Marshmallow Peeps were singing in a nearby lollipop tree and she could hear the rustle of gummi worms sifting through cocoa dirt. The sky seemed bluer, somehow, and the lemon drop sun more yellow, than normal, even though she knew that the only thing different about this day, and this moment, was what the two of them were about to do. "You'll have to watch for me leaving the game," she said, her voice coming out remarkably steady considering how her heart was fluttering.

With a nod, he asked, "You remember how to get to the kart garage?"

"Yeah." She clenched and unclenched her fists several times. She hadn't slept much the night before, and honestly she felt like she might never sleep again. The whole world had a weird, crystalline clarity, like she could see everything at twice the speed she normally could and at 128 bit instead of 64. When the quarter alert announcement blared through the game, there was a sharp edge to the familiar voice, as though she was hearing it amplified through some sort of filter that made it simultaneously more and less real, closer and farther away, and both louder and softer. Maybe this was what it was like to lose your mind.

The thing was, she didn't feel like she was losing her mind. She felt more convinced than ever that this was the right thing to do. They'd stood outside the castle for over an hour before the first quarter alert had come, and she didn't have high hopes for the player, who didn't look old enough to steer and reach the pedals at the same time.

Hoisting the bag containing his clothes onto her shoulder, she said, "Let's go." The castle gardens had an entrance into the castle, and King Candy thought he could get into it even if it was locked.

They headed around the side of the castle and boosted themselves over the garden wall, landing in a bed of pumpkin spice marshmallow vines. The smell of cinnamon and nutmeg calmed Taffyta down a little bit, but she didn't appreciate the orange stains the marshmallows left on her tights. It was going to be impossible to get them out later.

Brushing themselves off, they moved through the garden to the door, which _was_ locked. Taffyta felt her heart sink, but King Candy waved away the concerned look on her face, then pulled a piece of metal out of his jacket and stuck it in the lock. He jiggled it up and down a few times, then there was a click, and he turned the knob.

As the door swung open, Taffyta asked in a quiet voice, "Where'd you learn how to do that?"

" _Paperboy_ ," he replied, poking his head through the door and then stepping through. "That kid had a real kleptomaniac streak; did a _lot_ of breaking and entering. Wonder if he ever turned any of that around…?"

She didn't ask why he'd wanted Paperboy to teach him how to pick locks, though she _did_ file it away to remember for later. Sometimes the realization that he'd had a whole life before she ever knew him as King Candy hit her all over again. Even though she _knew_ , in those moments, she felt its strangeness all over again. Sometimes it felt like she was getting to know him for a second time.

The door opened onto an empty hallway that Taffyta thought she recognized. They closed it softly behind them and made their way in the direction of the camera room. Neither of them spoke and their footsteps were silent on the sugar cube floor. King Candy had stuffed some cotton candy in the gumdrop bells of his shoes to muffle their jingling. "By the way," he asked in a low tone, "how are you planning on distracting the guard?"

Taffyta tossed her hair. "By playing dumb, duh. I'm a little blonde girl, people _already_ think I'm just a ditz. Acting stupid's _exactly_ what they expect from me."

With a soft chuckle, he said, "Underestimate Taffyta Muttonfudge at your own peril—now _that'sth_ a lesson I learned early on."

She flashed a grin at him just as they reached a junction in the hallway. Taffyta knew that to the right was the camera room and that the guard would come from the left. They turned towards each other, neither of them saying a word for a moment. Taffyta didn't _know_ what to say. Nothing seemed appropriate. If he got caught, no one was going to believe anything he said to defend himself. Even if they believed him, they wouldn't get why he'd done it. They'd think he was trying to hurt the game when he wasn't.

She opened her mouth to say something, even though she still wasn't sure exactly what it was going to be, at the exact same time that he started, "Taffyta—"

They both stopped and he motioned to her to speak. She swallowed and said, "I just—good luck. Be careful."

Giving her a serious look, he said, " _You_ better be careful. If you can't crash safely, don't do it at all. You know—"

"I know, I know, if you die outside your game, that's it." She gave him a confident smile. Of everything in this plan, the thing she was _least_ worried about was her ability to do a stunt crash and come out of it unscathed. _That_ part was easy. They'd planned her driving route anyway, and she knew exactly how close she needed to cut her turn near _Virtua Cop_ to hit the phalanx of benches nearby and send her car flipping end over end. It would end up resting upside-down against the wall and she'd unbuckle her seat belt, remove the Turbo jumpsuit and helmet, and sneak off. Anyone who saw her would assume she was out there to kill time on an off-roster day.

There was a flicker of doubt in his eyes. "I'm serious," he said. "Don't—I mean—" But then he closed his mouth and exhaled sharply. "Just be careful."

"I will," she said, surprised by this show of concern. And touched, if she was honest.

He nodded and didn't say anything else on the subject, though that shadow of doubt was still in his eyes. Instead, he nodded and said, "Well—hoo-hoo—showtime, I guessth." Then, without another word, he slipped around the corner and continued down the hallway. Taffyta watched him until he disappeared around another turn, and then she took a breath, squared her shoulders, and took the hallway that led towards the throne room. The new guard would come from there, so as she walked, she plastered a mixture of concern and confusion on her face.

Right on time, the Oreo guard appeared, and Taffyta squealed. " _Finally!_ I thought I was never gonna find anyone in here!"

The guard stopped and gave her a stern look. "What are you doing here?"

She gave him her sweetest smile and batted her eyelashes at him. "I was looking for Vanellope, I thought she'd be at the starting line because she wasn't yesterday, so shouldn't she be on the roster today?"

The effect was instantaneous. What a dum-dum. And how completely predictable. Why did everyone assume she was stupid? The combination of her big blue eyes and pitching her voice up got them every time. Well, she'd be offended by it later, since right now she was totally using it to her advantage. Any suspicion on his face immediately disappeared as he replied, "The president isn't racing today, Miss Muttonfudge. I'm not sure where she is right now."

Scrunching her face in concentration, Taffyta said, "Um, are you _sure?_ 'Cause I'm pretty sure she wasn't on the roster yesterday, and like, not being on the roster two days in a row isn't that _random_ , don't you think?" Was she laying it on too thick? This was pretty much her best Candlehead imitation, but she didn't think the Oreo guards could really tell them apart beyond their names and the color of their clothes.

The Oreo guard smiled indulgently and Taffyta forced herself not to roll her eyes. "'Fraid that's not how it works, Miss Muttonfudge. President von Schweetz can be off the roster two days in a row, even with the randomizer."

Taffyta giggled. "Okay, well, I _guess_. If you say so." The guard nodded and took a step to continue towards the camera room and she panicked. No way, she hadn't given King Candy enough time! "Um, hey!" she said, grabbing his arm. "So like, do you know if she's coming back here later? Because I know a lot of times she just goes to hang out with Wreck-It Ralph, so is that what she's doing tonight?"

"The President doesn't usually keep us apprised of her evening plans," the guard said, shaking her loose.

"Really?" Taffyta asked. "That seems…" What did it seem? Did it matter what she said? "…weird. That seems _weird_."

"Not really."

"Oh!" She giggled again. "I guess not. Sorry, that's probably why Vanellope's president, right? She just kind of gets stuff."

That should do it. Good thing, too, because this was so nonsensical that she wondered where she was going to go from there. The fact that the guard stood and thought about it for a second was icing on the cake. "I…suppose," he said. She gave him an extra saccharine smile and he said, "I have to get to my post now, Miss Muttonfudge. I hope you find President von Schweetz later."

"I'm sure I will, thank you, bye!" she chirped, waving to him and balancing on one foot. When she was sure he wouldn't turn back around, she allowed the smile to drop off her face. Time to get to the kart garage. Vanellope's kart had better be there. It was one of the variables they didn't have any way to control, but Taffyta was pretty sure the president left it up at the castle when she wasn't on the roster.

Quickly and quietly, she continued down the corridor until she reached the door that led to the kart garage on the castle's lower level. Once she'd descended the spiral staircase, she took half a second to admire the space, which she'd been in once before. Cavernous, glittering, and well-lit, it housed fifteen karts, all different, and all totally beautiful as they gleamed in the light. They were all a lot nicer than the one Vanellope had made with Ralph, that was for sure, but Taffyta got it. That one was special. Anyway, she supposed it didn't matter how it looked, as long as you could win races in it, and Vanellope had no problem at all winning races in her little mutant kart. Of course, her glitch was basically cheating, but…

Shaking herself, Taffyta stepped into the garage. Vanellope's glitching wasn't cheating, it was just something she could do. Yeah. Right. Anyway, now wasn't the time to be thinking about that. She looked around and spotted Vanellope's kart at the other end of the garage, closest to the door leading outside. _Okay, Taffyta, time to do this._ The clock in her head was running and she knew she needed to get a move on; it had been just over six minutes since she'd left King Candy in the hallway.

She ran across the garage and threw her bag in the kart, then quickly pulled Turbo's jumpsuit on over her clothes. She hopped into the seat, feeling odd about sitting in another racer's kart. "Sorry, Pink Lightning," she mumbled, jamming Turbo's helmet over her head.

For just a moment, she sat there, getting used to the feel of the seat, the distance to the pedals, the position of the clutch. She put her hands on the steering wheel and flexed her fingers around it. Then, she checked one last time that she had the little code transmitter box—safely in the pocket of the jumpsuit—and punched the starter on the kart.

It roared to life, the engine echoing in the vaulted space of the garage, and Taffyta put her foot down on the gas and shifted. The garage door opened as she approached it, and once she was clear, she shifted again and held her foot down on the gas. The kart streaked down the road, cocoa dust billowing behind her, and she turned the wheel hard, drifting around the corner. NPCs scattered as she tore toward Rainbow Bridge. Good, if they'd seen the bright red T on her helmet, they might start alerting people. That would give King Candy more time in the code vault.

Tucking herself low over the steering wheel, she upshifted as she reached the bridge and went zooming up the steep slope. The kart didn't handle as well on the bridge as Pink Lightning did, nor was it as fast as the Royal Racer (which she'd driven once three months ago), but holy candy corn, its acceleration was impressive. She reached the exit to the game and shot through into the dark tunnel between _Sugar Rush_ and Game Central Station. The headlights on the kart flickered on, illuminating the train tracks in front of her, but she could do this trip with her eyes closed. Litwak hadn't moved the cord in years, so every contour and turn of the tunnel was indelibly imprinted on her mind. Like any other track in the game, she guessed. After fifteen years, she could probably do _all_ of them with her eyes closed.

A circle of light appeared in front of her, and she tightened her hands around the steering wheel. This was it. Thirteen minutes had passed. If everything had gone according to plan—if King Candy hadn't already been caught and thrown in the fungeon—then he should be ready to enter the code vault by now. He'd said he needed a minimum of three minutes to get in, change the code, and get out. That timer couldn't officially start until she set the alarm off on _Virtua Cop._ After that, there wasn't much she could do. She just had to hope he was as fast as he claimed.

The light got brighter and she breathed in slowly through her nose. Everything seemed to slow around her. It always did when she found herself at a point in a race where she had to make a whole series of quick decisions, decisions where you didn't have time to stop and think about it, you just had to do them through practice and muscle memory. But when time slowed like this, it gave her a few extra seconds to study what was happening around her as her brain worked double-time to choose the best course.

And it was time to pull off the best controlled crash of her life.

Over the years, Taffyta had perfected crashing without really crashing, because she hated, _hated_ dying and regenerating. As long as she wasn't getting taken out by a giant gumball or a Sweet Seeker, she could almost always control how she wiped out. It was something that she'd worked on with King Candy years ago, more than a decade, and it suddenly occurred to her, as she careened towards Game Central Station, that the reason _he_ was probably so good at it was that he'd wanted to avoid dying in _Sugar Rush_ for as long as possible, just in case his coding wasn't as good as he'd thought it was and he didn't regenerate.

She shot into Game Central Station, feeling herself burst through the pocket of air that preceded the kart as it had zoomed through the tunnel. Characters screamed and jumped out of the way and Taffyta allowed herself a small smile. There was nothing, _nothing_ like being behind the wheel and holding your foot down on the gas. Hadn't King Candy said he'd taken his kart out here back when _TurboTime_ had still been plugged in? She could see why; there weren't many places even in _Sugar Rush_ with such a long straightaway. _TurboTime_ definitely hadn't had anything like it.

Cranking the wheel, she turned towards _Virtua Cop_ , down at the other end of GCS. Everything was going exactly according to plan. She'd been _worried_ about this? This was too easy! She'd crash, change, and be back in _Sugar Rush_ within ten minutes. The train had even been sitting there at the station, waiting for her to board it and bring her back to the game. Total piece of cake. She could even see the group of benches she was going to use to flip her kart, and they were empty, just like she'd expected them to be at this time of the day. Her shoulders un-tensed. This was going to work. Dimly, she was aware that the alarm hadn't gone off on _Sugar Rush_ when she'd left the outlet. Okay, so not _everything_ was going to plan—but that was no big deal. Once she sent the transmission of King Candy's code, that would be all the alarm they needed.

Fifteen seconds, ten seconds, five seconds. Taffyta sucked in a breath and put her hand in her pocket, resting her thumb on the button that would send the transmission towards _Virtua Cop._ But then her chest and stomach seized with ice as a football came sailing through the air directly in front of her kart, followed a moment later by one of the football players from _Madden._

"Oh, motherfudging _sugar_ ," she said.

She swerved to avoid the football player, way, _way_ too fast, way too hard, and she knew immediately that she'd made a deadly mistake. The kart flipped up onto its two left wheels and fishtailed, and if this was her own kart then maybe, _maybe_ she'd have been able to correct but she couldn't get this kart under control fast enough. It wouldn't respond to her. She looked up, her heart in her throat, just in time to see the bank of video monitors looming in front of her. All she could do was brace herself.

The kart slammed into the the kiosk with a screech of metal and a hail of sprinkles and wafer, spinning and coming to rest upside down, and everything went black.


	11. Chapter 11

CHAPTER 11

" _If you leave your game, stay safe, stay alert. And whatever you do, don't die. Because if you die outside your own game, you don't regenerate. Ever. Game over._ "

Was this what being dead was? Taffyta's whole head felt stuffed with cotton candy, and when she opened her eyes, there was nothing but blackness. But the smell of burning sugar crept into her nose and that was a little too familiar to believe that she was in arcade heaven. Huh, maybe that was a little ambitious—how did she know she wasn't going to arcade hell?

" _If you leave your game, stay safe, stay alert. And whatever you do, don't die. Because if you die outside your own game, you don't regenerate. Ever. Game over._ "

Two sounds penetrated her fog. One was a wailing siren. Funny, she'd never heard a siren in Game Central Station. There was the plug-in alarm, but that didn't sound anything like this, that was more like a short, sharp, _blat_. Then she realized her hand was still in her pocket—and her thumb was depressing the button on the remote that she'd been clutching in her palm before she crashed. She didn't even remember pressing it.

The other sound was, well— " _If you leave your game, stay safe, stay alert. And whatever you do—_ "

"Don't die, yeah, I got it," she muttered, realizing that the kart must have come to a stop against the video monitors playing Sonic's PSA. She lifted her arms to her head and discovered the reason she couldn't see anything was because Turbo's helmet had rotated over her eyes in the crash. It had kept her safe, though. Her head felt fine, and as she flexed and moved all her body parts, from her toes to her fingers, she found that she was still in one piece.

She'd think about how lucky she'd been later. Right now, she had to get out of this jumpsuit and out of _here_ before anyone spotted her. She heard shouts and figured it was only a matter of seconds before Surge showed up. Luckily, the kart's engine was on fire and smoke was obscuring her. Not for long, though.

She ripped the helmet off, unzipped the jumpsuit, and unbuckled the seatbelt. Without it holding her in place, she fell to the floor, landing hard on her shoulder. Wincing, she pushed herself up to her knees, wriggled the rest of the way out of the jumpsuit, and then grabbed her bag and stuffed everything in before slipping away from the kart and around the other side of the kiosk. Had anyone seen her?

There was a crackling zip sound and Taffyta froze. "He's not here," Surge's voice said, sounding closer to panic than Taffyta had ever heard him.

"I saw the whole thing and I _swear_ he didn't make it into the game," another voice said. One of the football players?

"Then why is the _alarm_ going off? It only goes off if Turbo enters an outlet." There were footsteps, and then Taffyta heard Surge mutter, "One too many hits to the head. That must be why you're inactive today, Collins."

The sound of a whole group of people running through the station caught her attention, and somebody yelled, "What's going on? Did Turbo game-jump?"

"That's what I'm trying to figure out," Surge shot back in a testy tone.

What was the best way to play this? Did she run and hope no one would spot her, or did she pretend like she'd just been hanging around? Nobody was on this side of the kiosk, so she hadn't been spotted yet. She licked her lips. It wasn't that far to the opposite wall. If she could be unobtrusive about getting over there, then maybe no one would pay attention to her.

Well, she had to do _something_ , so, sucking in a deep breath, she kept her head down and walked as briskly as she could to the outlet opposite _Virtua Cop._ Her whole body was one tightly coiled ache as she kept expecting someone to yell for her to stop, what was she doing here, and what did she have to do with this? How could she _possibly_ look anything other than guilty right now? Was she slouching? She was slouching. _Shoulders back, Taffyta. Come on, stop looking so much like you just stole the president's kart and crashed it so the guy everyone hates can mess with your game's code._ Yeah right. Easier said than done.

But no one stopped her. She reached the wall and put a hand to it, shifting her bag to her other shoulder so that her body was blocking it mostly from view. Her lungs ached and she realized she'd barely taken a breath in the past minute. There was a group of at least twenty people gathered around Vanellope's wrecked kart. Taffyta felt a kick of nausea when she saw it. The front was entirely crumpled, the rear spoiler was cracked in half, and the back axel was bent. She was lucky that she'd been able to walk away unscathed.

Two Oreo guards rushed to the scene and Taffyta quickly looked at the ground. One of them would probably be the one she'd talked to—all the castle guards had volunteered to be part of the special force tasked with keeping Turbo from game-jumping. With her heart pounding, she made her way back to the _Sugar Rush_ outlet. The walk hadn't taken so long in her whole, entire life. It felt like an hour from one end of the station to the other, and all the while she couldn't help thinking that everyone was staring at her, wondering why she wasn't more interested in the fact that an alarm was still blaring and that her president's go-kart was laying in a smoking heap next to _Virtua Cop_.

But then she was there, and she'd never been so happy to board the slow, dumpy, neon train that would take her back to her game. She had it to herself, and once it slid away from Game Central Station, she slumped and let out a huge breath. She'd done what she'd needed to do. Had King Candy?

The trip took longer by train than it did by kart—well, duh—and when it arrived in the station, she jumped out and bounded outside. There were a few NPCs hovering at the top of the Rainbow Bridge. When one of them tried to stop her to ask what was going on, Taffyta plastered her best clueless look on her face. "What do you mean?" she asked in a befuddled tone.

The peanut butter cup look scared. "The alarm's going off in Game Central Station."

"Oh." Taffyta glanced over her shoulder towards the train. "I don't know, I didn't hear anything. I guess I must have already been on my way back." Inspiration struck. "Did you ask Vanellope?"

"Not yet…"

Giving the NPC a reassuring smile, Taffyta said, "Well, how about I find her? I'm sure it's nothing, but I'll let her know people are worried, okay?"

"Oh, thank you, Taffyta!" the peanut butter cup squeaked.

Taffyta flashed her a victory sign with the hand that she didn't have clenched around the strap of her bag, and then she took off again. At least the NPC would think she was running down the bridge to be helpful, instead of the real reason, which was that she needed to know _right now_ if King Candy had pulled off his part in this.

When she finally arrived at the bottom of the sparkling sugar road that led up to the castle, panting and out of breath, she found King Candy standing there, tossing a cinnamon imperial up and down. Oh, thank gamers, he hadn't been caught, he was okay, and that meant everything must have gone according to plan. She doubled over, and with her hands on her knees, gasped, "Did it work?"

There was silence for a moment while the cinnamon imperial arced across the sun and landed neatly in his hand. He hesitated before tossing it again. Then, he said, "Not exactly."

 _Not exactly?!_ She straightened up, her body wanting to gasp in shock, but she didn't have the lung capacity for it and broke out in a fit of coughing. Her brain couldn't process this. What was he talking about? He thumped her on the back and she finally asked in a strangled voice, " _What?_ After all that, it didn't even go right?"

He threw the cinnamon imperial over his shoulder and gave her a serious look. "Oh no, it went perfectly. The guard in the throne room went running out right on cue, and it was a piecthe of cake getting into the code vault. But…"

Taffyta was staring at him, her eyes wide. "But _what_?"

"Well, I was standing there, looking inside—you know how beautiful it is, right, all those strands of code—I mean, it's, I don't know, sort of perfect, don't you think? No? Maybe it's a coder thing… Well, anyway, I was standing there and then—" He stopped and fiddled with the button on his waistcoat. Taffyta waited. Then, with a sigh, he said, "I couldn't do it."

"You couldn't…do it?" For a second, she thought she'd heard wrong.

But he was nodding and making a face. "I mustht be going soft. Only took practically sixteen years of living here but I guess it was bound to happen at some point, all the smiley faces and candy…" When Taffyta just kept staring at him, he asked, "What, do you want the blow-by-blow of my thought process?"

"No," she said, finding her voice. "Just like…maybe the short version."

King Candy shrugged. "Short version: there's a few people in this arcade who seem strangely dedicated to giving me a second chance." He shrugged. "Look, you're the one who told me Felix doesn't have an angle. You don't think _any_ of them have an angle. Ralph, Candlehead, the other racers. You think they're just being… _decent_ to me because…well, because they're decent."

"Yeah. They are," she said, wondering what this had to do with anything.

With another shrug, this one accompanied by his form going glitchy, he looked away and said, "Yeah, well. Like I said, going soft." He glanced back at her and added, "Anyway, there might even be one person around here who makes me stop and think if what I'm doing is the right thing to be doing. _She_ told me recently that you can't plan for everything. She was right, as usual."

"Oh," she said. Warmth ballooned somewhere behind her sternum.

There was the sound of an approaching siren and the roar of a kart. King Candy rolled his eyes. "Here comes the cavalry. I'm going to have to deal with the fallout from stealing the glitch's kart and going out into Game Central Station, even though I didn't even really _do_ it." He met her eyes. "Do me a favor, Taff, will you? Just stay out of what's going to be—hoo-hoo—an undoubtedly ugly confrontation."

"But—" she began.

He held up a hand. "Let me handle it, okay?"

Taffyta made a frustrated noise, but then she nodded. As the sirens got louder, she moved closer to him and lowered the bag to the ground. Within a minute, Wynchel and Duncan came into view on their motorcycles, followed by the C.L.A.W. van. Vanellope was leading all three on a kart that Taffyta recognized from the kart garage. They all came screeching to a stop and Vanellope glitched from the seat of the kart to the ground, looking murderous.

"Give me _one_ good reason I shouldn't lock you in the fungeon again!" Vanellope yelled. Her face was red-bordering-on-purple and twisted in rage and—was it fear?

Wynchel and Duncan advanced, but King Candy held his hands up. "Look, I wasn't trying to game-jump, all right? I'm just _bored_. You try sitting around here all day doing nothing."

"I _did_ ," Vanellope snarled. "For fifteen years!"

He studied his fingernails, as if he didn't have a care in the world. "Well then, you know exactly how boring it is." Raising an eyebrow, he asked, "Is it because I stole your kart? It is, isn't it. _That's_ why you're really mad."

Vanellope glitched violently, her form lost in waves of binary for a moment. When she was able to get it under control, she said, "Can you guys just handcuff him or something?!"

With a scoff, he said, "What, don't tell me you're _arresting_ me."

"Yes!" she shouted. "That's exactly what I'm doing, you creep!"

Taffyta gasped, and even though King Candy had told her to stay out of it, she shouted, "No!"

Vanellope rounded on her, like she'd forgotten Taffyta was there and was only realizing now what an oversight that was. "And where were you?! _You're_ supposed to be babysitting him!"

Her heart seized into a fist and she dug her fingers into her palms. "I…" she began. Then she looked at King Candy. His eyes narrowed imperceptibly and she realized what she was going to do. Furthermore, she realized that _he_ had realized what she was going to do just a fraction of a second before she herself had. _Stay out of what's going to be an undoubtedly ugly confrontation._ Ha. Fat chance. When had she ever stayed out of anything in her entire life?

Taffyta took a deep breath. "I was out in Game Central Station, pretending to be Turbo."

Wynchel paused in the act of raising his nightstick, Duncan ran into him, and Vanellope glitched again. The lights on the C.L.A.W. van were still flashing, making this feel like the scene of a grisly accident. Maybe that wasn't too far from reality. "You wanna run that by me again one more time?" Vanellope said, her tone suddenly scarily calm.

There was a torturous silence, which eventually Wynchel filled by asking, "Um, Your Presidency? Do you still want us to arrest him?"

"No," King Candy said.

"Shut up," Vanellope snapped. "And hold onto that thought for a second. I wanna hear what Taffyta's talking about."

Taffyta had never, not once in her life, seen Vanellope this angry. The other girl's face was flushed and her eyes were glinting with furious brightness, and her teeth were practically bared. Then again, maybe she _had_ seen Vanellope this angry. Maybe it was just that every other time, Vanellope had been helpless, and Taffyta had been the top dog. Now their positions were reversed, and Taffyta didn't like it one bit. She felt small, scared, and very, very vulnerable.

But she'd committed herself now. No going back. She licked her lips and glanced at King Candy, who shook his head slightly. She ignored him and looked back to Vanellope. "I stole your kart. I dressed up like Turbo so everyone would think he'd left _Sugar Rush_."

A single glitch rippled up Vanellope, but her anger seemed to have evaporated for the moment. It seemed to have been shocked out of her. "Why would you do that?"

She rubbed at her arm with her opposite hand. "I…"

"Taffyta," King Candy said in a low tone.

Her heart was pounding, but she couldn't see a way out of this besides telling the truth. She wasn't going to let him take the fall for something he hadn't even done. Then again, what he'd been planning to do would probably be way worse in Vanellope's mind. "It was just to keep the game safe," she said, her voice shaking. "To keep us from getting unplugged." Her throat closed up, and for a second, she stood there in silence. They _all_ stood there in silence. Wynchel and Duncan looked flabbergasted, and King Candy had an expression on his face that Taffyta couldn't read.

"Yeah, and?" Vanellope finally asked.

Taffyta closed her eyes tightly. "I…wanted everyone to think that he was outside the game so he could get into the code vault and change a couple lines of code. Not to hurt anybody!" she added quickly, as Vanellope took three glitchy, stumbling steps back. "I just—it was my idea, okay?" Maybe this wasn't exactly true, but she'd gladly let Vanellope think this was just another impulsive, stupid, Taffyta Muttonfudge-brand decision. The alternative was her thinking King Candy had brainwashed her or something. " _I_ wanted to do it. I just wanted the bad racers to be chosen more often by the randomizer, nothing horrible! Nothing bad."

Vanellope's glitching was out of control. She was just a Vanellope-shaped garble of blue pixels. Wynchel and Duncan shuffled closer, looking between Taffyta and King Candy. Taffyta's mouth went dry. Would…would Vanellope arrest _both_ of them after all this? Pixie sticks, they never should have done this; why had either of them thought this was a good plan, why couldn't they just have left well enough alone—

But Vanellope got her glitching under control and she didn't tell Wynchel and Duncan to arrest them. Instead, she just stared, her face white with shock. Finally, she managed to ask, "Why?"

For a second, Taffyta couldn't seem to make any sound come out of her mouth. The fact that Vanellope wasn't yelling anymore was definitely scarier. She swallowed and opened her mouth to answer, but nothing came out at first except a hoarse, strangled sound. After a second, Wynchel went to prod her with his nightstick, but before it touched her, King Candy reached out with a snarl and hit it away, growling, " _Don't touch her_ , you lard-filled doofus."

Vanellope didn't react to this. Instead, she crossed her arms over her chest. "Spit it out, Taffyta."

She felt like she might hyperventilate, but she took a couple shallow breaths and said, "People weren't playing the game as much. You had to've noticed, right?" When she looked at Vanellope hopefully, the other girl just stared back at her with a flat expression. Taffyta tried not to wilt. "We thought…I thought if the code was changed in the randomizer, and it started choosing the bad racers, then you'd see what a bad idea it was, and you'd go back to the Random Roster Race."

With a contemptuous scoff, Vanellope said, "You wanna talk about bad ideas—"

King Candy made a disgusted noise, and everyone turned towards him. "Oh, please. Listen, glitch, you don't give the gamersth a _challenge,_ and they'll find one somewhere else. I'm kind of an expert on the concept, so maybe it's not the _worst_ idea to trust me on this one."

"Uh, it's not the _worst_ idea, but it's for sure up there," Vanellope retorted. "And I wouldn't call you an 'expert' as much as a paranoid nutcase. Offense totally intended."

He rolled his eyes and demanded, "Why are you letting _awful_ racers who have _never_ cared about winning onto the roster? Don't you _know_ who your best racers _are_? Can you possibly _be_ that stupid?"

"I wanna give _everyone_ a chance to race, King Puffy-Pants!" Vanellope snarled. "Not like _you_ , trying to keep people out who didn't meet your standards!"

Laughing derisively, he said, "Oh, _please_ , there are _nine_ spotsth on that roster _every single day._ If you want to race, you make sure you get on it. You do what you have to do to _make that happen_."

"Like you?" Vanellope said. "You sure did whatever you had to do."

He narrowed his eyes at her but ignored the jab. "Let me tell you who should be on that roster tomorrow if you want more than pre-schoolers and senior citizens looking for a place to sit down to play this game." He started ticking off on his fingers. "Taffyta, Candlehead, Rancis, Snowanna, Adorabeezle, Crumbelina, Gloyd, Jubileena, and I suppose _you_ , glitch, since you're pretty amazing out on the track."

Vanellope looked momentarily speechless, which was a pretty impressive feat. Taffyta could only assume it was King Candy's admission that she was one of the best racers in the game. She herself couldn't help glowing a little over the fact that he'd named her first. Even if one or both of them was going to get thrown in the fungeon after this, at least he thought she was the best racer out of all of them.

Then, Vanellope's face grew hard again. "Tell me how to get rid of whatever…whatever horrible changes you made."

He waved a hand with a flick of his wrist. "No need. I didn't actually do it."

Vanellope blinked. "Huh? But Taffyta just said—"

Glitching a little, he put his hands on his hips and said, "Yes, thanks, since I'm not deaf I heard Taffyta, believe it or not. Do you need to get _your_ hearing checked? _I didn't do it._ Your precious randomizer's totally intact, with the same code it had yesterday."

Glaring at him, Vanellope said, "How do I know you're telling the truth?"

"I guessth you don't. Have somebody check if you don't believe me."

Taffyta knew full well that almost nobody in the arcade would be able to tell if King Candy had altered the code or not, and Vanellope knew it too. But the other girl still said, "Yeah, I will."

King Candy shrugged. How could he possibly be so calm? Taffyta's legs were shaking so hard that she thought she was going to collapse. At any moment, Vanellope was going to…to like, come to her senses. Well, not her senses, exactly, but she was going to remember that she was furious at them and order Wynchel and Duncan to arrest them. Every single time that she'd vouched for King Candy, every time she'd insisted that he was trying to be a better person, that he wasn't a monster, and they'd thrown it all away for something that was never going to look like anything except trying to re-code the game.

No one moved for a long, long moment. Then, Vanellope looked straight at Taffyta. "Is he telling the truth?"

Without hesitation, Taffyta nodded. It had never occurred to her not to believe him.

"Ugh," Vanellope said, rolling her eyes into the back of her head. "Okay. I have to figure this out. Can you just—I don't know, put yourselves under house arrest or something? Wynchel, Duncan, you can go." The police looked disappointed. Pointing at both King Candy and Taffyta in turn, Vanellope said, "And I'm going to come by later and make sure you're there, so don't even think about trying to sneak out to _Tapper's_ or something."

"Okay," Taffyta said in a small voice.

Glaring at them one last time, Vanellope hopped back into the kart and tore off. Wynchel and Duncan regretfully shuffled away, and Taffyta and King Candy were left alone. Taffyta sank to her knees and put her hands over her face. "Oh my god," she moaned. "We're dead. We're so, so, _so_ dead, she's gonna change her mind and come back and she's going to throw us in the fungeon and you're never going to race again and _I'm_ never going to race again and—"

"Taffyta, Taffyta!" he interrupted. Her rambling devolved into wordless whimpering, and he knelt next to her. "Hey. Taff. Listen. It's going to be fine. Okay?"

She shifted one finger to the side so she could see him, even with her hands still over her face. "How do you know?" she asked, her voice muffled by her palms.

He glitched, appearing as Turbo briefly, before glitching back. Then he stood up and offered her a hand. "I don't, it's just sthomething I tell myself to stay sane. Sometimes it works better than others."

She removed her hands from her face and looked up at him. _Was_ it going to be fine? They weren't in the fungeon now. That was a plus. She swallowed, then took his hand and let him pull her up. Everything would be fine. Sure. Right. Deep breaths and delusions and probably a really long nap, and she might just get through the rest of this day.


	12. Chapter 12

Author's note: As this is the last chapter, I want to thank everyone who's read this! I hope you liked it and would love to hear from you if you did! Or, for that matter, if you didn't, though I don't know why you'd have read this far if you didn't like it.

Special shout-out and thank you to my wife, Windsett (read her fanfiction, she's on this site!), who was my beta reader and number one fan, and who put up with me bouncing ideas for this fic off her for the last seven or eight months and taking notes on the plot points when I was rabidly coming up with stuff while driving.

And a question for anyone who cares to drop me a line - the sequel to this is finished, do you want to see chapter posted in the near future, or do you want to let this one settle a little?

* * *

CHAPTER 12

After the first three days, Taffyta stopped being afraid that the C.L.A.W. van was going to show up outside her door at any moment. After five days, Candlehead stopped by to tell her she could race again. And after a week, Taffyta accepted that indefinite incarceration, at least, was off the table. If they were going to get in any more trouble, it probably wasn't going to be something catastrophic.

Still, the trouble they were in was enough. Vanellope hadn't let her race for five days, despite the fact that the randomizer had picked her for the roster for every single one of them. She'd also made it clear that King Candy wasn't welcome to visit Game Central Station, let alone any other games. The two of them had had to sit with her and go through their plan step by step, and Vanellope had brought Surge to look at the code that King Candy had written to alter the randomizer, so that Surge could go check to make sure that it actually wasn't there.

That was the last time Vanellope had spoken to Taffyta for weeks. When they were on the roster together, Vanellope pretended she didn't exist, and Taffyta didn't try to make amends. At least, not anymore. At first she'd tried apologizing, but Vanellope had just looked at her coldly and turned away. So she didn't bother now—she just kept her head down and raced.

The other racers didn't know exactly how to act around her, but they didn't know the whole story. Even though they followed Vanellope's lead at first, it didn't take long for them to get bored and started treating her normally again.

Not that it made her feel any better. She'd screwed up. Her and King Candy had _both_ screwed up. And Taffyta knew that so far, they'd gotten off pretty easy and that she shouldn't complain; she shouldn't even _think_ about complaining, and the only thing she should be was grateful that nothing more had happened than house arrest.

"But this is like, the total _worst_ ," Taffyta moaned. It was just after arcade close and she'd gone straight home. As usual. _She'd_ been banned from Game Central Station too, and even though the other racers were being nice to her during arcade hours, the power of Vanellope's glare if any of them approached her to ask if she wanted to hang out had been enough to send them hemming and hawing in the other direction.

So she'd gone home and flopped down onto one of the strawberry poufs in the living room. With her arms and legs splayed in opposite directions, she said, "You'd think that we like…I don't know, that we did something _really_ bad—"

King Candy glanced over at her from the kitchen table, where he was fiddling with one of Pink Lightning's side mirrors. It had broken off today in a crash with Rancis and had a dent in the normally smooth finish. She could have fixed it herself, but it was something for him to do besides sit around and listen to the sound of go-karts on the breeze. "Like take over a game and reprogram it?"

"I wasn't going to say that."

He chuckled humorlessly and didn't say anything else, and Taffyta went back to staring at the ceiling.

Then someone knocked on the door.

Taffyta shot up and opened the door so fast that she almost tripped over her own feet. She blinked at who she saw standing outside and her face fell. "Oh," she said. "It's you."

Surge Protector gave her a flat look and replied, "I have better things to do, too."

"Do you?" King Candy asked from behind her.

Surge's expression seemed to get marginally more testy. Reaching up to adjust his glasses, he said, "I _would_ , if the two of you hadn't gotten it into your heads that you needed to mess with this game's code. Again."

"Now, Surge, you don't have to drag Taffyta into it," King Candy drawled.

With a sniff, Surge said, "You're right, _I_ don'thave to. You already did. Now, let's see here, I have the results of my investigation right here…" He held up his clipboard, squinted at the paper on it, and then flipped to the next page. Then he flipped to the page after that. Taffyta crossed her arms over her chest and leaned against the door frame, an exasperated expression on her face. Like it wasn't enough that he was here, did he _also_ have to take forever to get to the point? "Oh, here it is," Surge said. "Now, based on information given to me by the relevant parties—"

Taffyta glanced over her shoulder at King Candy, who rolled his eyes and said, "That'd be me, Surge, and you know, I remember writing out the code for you, so maybe you could, I dunno, consider spitting it out?"

Surge raised his eyebrows and flipped several pieces of paper forward. "You try to do your job right," he muttered in a tone that was clearly meant to be overheard. "As I was _saying_ , based on the information provided, I performed a full examination of the code, and I found that…"

Taffyta didn't know why she was holding her breath. She knew what the outcome was, because King Candy had told her he hadn't done anything. She hadn't doubted once in the last few weeks that he'd been telling the truth, and she wasn't about to start now.

Looking a little disappointed, Surge finished, "…that none of the code had been altered in any way."

She glanced over her shoulder at King Candy, who debonairly twirled his wrist and gave Surge a sarcastic half-bow. " _So_ glad to hear it. You know, with that long, dramatic pause, you even had _me_ on the edge of my seat, and I was the one that didn't alter the code in any way in the first place. I mean—" He paused and gestured. "In the first place _this_ time, not in the _first_ first place, I suppose if you go that far back then yes, I did, but!" Clasping his hands behind his back, he said, "Point is, you should have just believed me this time."

Surge raised his eyebrows even higher, then took his pen out of his breast pocket and made a note of something on his clipboard. "Well, now I've heard it all. It's not like you have a track record of mayhem and destruction or anything."

Taffyta glared at him. "Are you done?"

Clicking the pen closed, he said, "Thankfully, almost. I have a message to pass along from Vanellope." At this, the sneer fell from Taffyta's face. If Vanellope was sending Surge to tell them something, that couldn't have been good. Surge adjusted his glasses again, then said, "She'd like me to let you know that you can feel free to leave this house. Both of you. And—" He shut his eyes briefly, as though in pain, or possibly eating something really gross. "—even though I warned her _repeatedly_ that it's a bad idea, you're also allowed back in Game Central Station."

"Really?" Taffyta asked, unable to keep the excitement out of her voice.

She jumped back as Surge stuck his pen right in her face. "But _do not_ pull another stunt like this again, or I'll fight _much_ harder to make sure neither of you set foot there ever again."

"Okay," Taffyta squeaked.

Surge glared at both of them, then pulled the door shut himself before he walked away.

Taffyta let it slam in her face before she turned around to face King Candy. He looked unimpressed, but his fingertips were also glitching faintly, so she knew he wasn't as blasé about this as he was pretending to be. "I guess it's a start?" she said.

Making a noise, King Candy returned to his seat at the kitchen table. "Feels like there's an awful lot of starting and not much progressing to the next stage lately."

And since she couldn't argue with that, she didn't.

* * *

They went out the following night, taking Taffyta's kart for a spin and ending up out near Cereal Box Canyon. She considered letting him drive, but doing that probably would have just gotten both of them in trouble again. Eventually, they stopped at a petrified Rice Krispie Treat formation and sat down on it, surrounded by the dry emptiness of _Sugar Rush's_ desert zone. Wind rattled through marzipan cactuses and in the distance, black licorice crows cawed as they circled the cliffs of the canyon.

"No good deed goes unpunished," King Candy snorted, picking at the cemented Rice Krispies. "Good for me, doing the right thing. I—what's the expression—tamed my demons? Look at that, the game-jumper didn't mess with the code. Big deal. We're still exactly where we were before."

Taffyta plonked her elbows on her knees and rested her chin in her hands. "Not to be a Little Debbie downer, but I think we might be _worse_ off. We still have the randomizer, and now we're like, _really_ stuck with it. Plus no one trusts us."

"Right, wouldn't want to forget that little detail, hoohoohoo."

Even though it wasn't funny, she laughed. What else was she supposed to do?

Neither of them spoke again for a few minutes, Taffyta contenting herself with the sound of the wind and the crows, and the faint chug of a go-kart approaching. Wait, the chug of a go-kart? She stood up and shaded her eyes with a hand, squinting against the bright glare of the sun on the ground. A cloud of dust was on the horizon, coming closer and heading straight for them. Taffyta narrowed her eyes, trying to see who it was. And then her mouth dropped open, and she tugged at King Candy's coat to make him stand up too.

The two of them watched the approaching kart until finally, with a spray of crushed cereal and colored sugar, it screeched to a stop right in front of them. As it had approached, Taffyta had felt King Candy coiling tight with anger, and as soon as the driver cut the engine, he snarled, "Glitch, get _out_ of my kart!"

Vanellope hopped out of the Royal Racer, plucking the gearstick out pulling her goggles off. " _Your_ kart? Hate to break it to you, chump, but stealing it never made it _yours_. _Sugar Rush_ doesn't have squatter's rights."

He clenched his fists, but Taffyta hit him with the back of her hand. "Be _nice_ ," she muttered. This was the first time Vanellope had spoken to her in _weeks_. Or spoken _at_ her, for that matter. Taffyta wasn't sure if that had really counted as Vanellope talking _to_ her.

With a huff, King Candy crossed his arms across his chest. "I will if she is."

"I don't have to be nice to you," Vanellope said, putting her hands on her hips and looking bored. "Kinda one of the perks of being president."

King Candy's eyes narrowed. "So what, you drove all the way out here to rub salt in the wound? I'm not allowed to race, you've got my kart, _and_ you're going to be a snotty brat about it?"

Vanellope's expression remained unimpressed and she glitched from the kart to the space directly in front of them. Her reappearance made King Candy jump and glitch a little himself. "Nope," she said. "That's just a bonus for you, King Cavity." His fists clenched again, and Taffyta wished she had the cachet with Vanellope to tell her to take it down a notch. Not that Vanellope would have listened to her even if she did.

But, to Taffyta's surprise, Vanellope looked just an itty bitty, _tiny_ little bit chagrined. "Actually," she said, "I came out here because…" She paused, looking between the two of them. The expression on her face wasn't exactly friendly, but it wasn't the cold hostility that Taffyta had gotten used to the last few weeks. "Well, I have a _proposal_ for you, Turbutt."

One of his eyebrows shot up. Twirling a wrist and extending his arm, he bowed in exaggerated courtesy and said, "Well then, _pleasthe_ , propose away, President von Glitch. I'm all ears. You know, as your _loyal_ subject."

"Loyal subject, yeah right," Vanellope snorted. Then, she hesitated. Had the nickname actually gotten to her? Taffyta was surprised—none of the invective he hurled at her ever seemed to faze her.

King Candy straightened up and studied his fingernails. "Gotcha! Presidents don't _have_ subjects. Oh, glitch, you're a royalist after all, hoohoohoo."

"What's the proposal?" Taffyta butted in. The two of them sniping at each other could go on all day. Okay, maybe that was an exaggeration. But it could definitely go on longer than Taffyta was willing to let it.

Both of them looked at her, then at each other. Vanellope cleared her throat. "Kind of a two-part deal, actually." She held up a finger. "First part—after much deliberation and consulting with my cabinet and panel of experts—"

"A halitosis-ridden oaf, a do-gooder doofus with some spray-painted hardware, and a 3D-rendered psychopath are a pretty pathetic cabinet," he cut in.

" _Hey_ ," Taffyta hissed.

He glanced at her. "Ralph and Felix are kind of growing on me, though. I guess, you know, us old-timers have to stick together."

Vanellope's lips were pursed and her eyebrows were raised to her hairline. "Are you done?" Without waiting for an answer, she went on, "Anyway, as I was saying before I was so _rudely_ interrupted by the peanut gallery here—we're going back to the Random Roster Race."

Taffyta almost choked in surprise and King Candy rocked back on his heels. "What?" Taffyta squeaked. "You _are_? But…why? You kept saying you didn't want to! You—you yelled at us and said the randomizer was fair, and—and that the Random Roster Race was keeping people out—"

"Yeah, yeah, I know what I said, but geez, Taffyta, isn't it like, the hallmark of a great leader to admit the error of her ways, or whatever? Something like that. And by the way, you totally deserved to get yelled at." Vanellope looked at the way they were both staring at her and blew a raspberry. "Fine, if you really wanna know…I got to thinking about the other racers, and how they didn't want to practice, and how totally not cool that was. We have the best job in the arcade, and they were taking it for granted." At King Candy's smug look, she rolled her eyes. "And it had _nothing_ to do with anything _you_ said, King Game-Stealer."

With a snort, King Candy said, "Keep telling yourself that, glitch."

Taffyta leaned into the line of sight—more like the line of glare—between them. "You said you had a proposal, Vanellope. That wasn't really a proposal…"

"Oh, yeah. That was more like an edict, I guess, huh?"

"Again," King Candy muttered, "presidents don't issue _edicts_ …"

Ignoring him, Vanellope said, "But yeah, I guess that was part two of why I came out here." She stopped talking, and the silence stretched out longer and longer, until Taffyta started wondering if Vanellope had had some sort of mental glitch and forgotten why she was standing there.

"And?" King Candy said. "You didn't drive all the way out here in _my_ kart just to stand there and gawp, right? You really could have used _your_ hunk of junk kart for that, instead of ruining the upholstery on mine." He raised an eyebrow. "Better yet, you didn't have to come out here to tell me at all. You could've just had a little shindig at my castle, right? Sorry, _your_ castle. Much as it painsth me to admit."

Vanellope glared at him but still didn't speak. It had been a pretty low blow, even for him, to go after her kart. Stealing and wrecking it had definitely _not_ gotten Taffyta any points. Vanellope's kart was like, the nearest and dearest thing to her heart. Everyone knew not to say a bad word against it, even if its design was kind of, uh, questionable.

But instead of snapping something back at him, she looked away and scuffed the toe of her shoe on the ground. "I had a question for you, Turbutt, if you must know."

King Candy looked intrigued, but suspicious. And he had a point, even if he hadn't said it in a very nice way. Why _had_ Vanellope come all this way in the Royal Racer, when she had a whole garage-full of karts to choose from? "Ask away," he said.

"Ah, man, I really think I'm going to regret this," Vanellope said. "It's not like you ever did anything to deserve it." She drew herself upright and stared him straight in the eyes. "Do you want to race again?"

There was a silence so profound that Taffyta almost thought she could hear the announcements from Game Central Station. Everything seemed to stand still for several long moments—not a single black licorice crow cawed, the wind died, and the train that made its way around the desert was silent and nowhere to be seen.

King Candy glitched, his form obscured in a scree of red binary, before he fought control back. "What?" he asked, his voice strangled.

Holding a finger up, Vanellope said, "We never race on the same days and you can only be out there every four days. Oh, and _no glitching_. You race as King Candy or you don't race, got it? Anyway, glitching's _my_ superpower."

His mouth had been hanging open slightly, but he snapped it shut, still staring at her. Then, he said, "Every two days."

She narrowed her eyes. "Three. Take it or leave it, King Cavity."

With a hard swallow, he nodded.

There was another moment of silence, and then Vanellope nodded curtly. "Okay, good." She chewed at her lip, then pulled out King Candy's scepter. "Guess you'll need this to drive, huh?" Without warning, she tossed it, and he snatched it out of the air. Drawing it close to his chest, he stared down at it, his eyes still wide with disbelief. Vanellope put a hand on her hip. "Man, and here I thought you'd be a _little_ bit grateful. Don't _you_ even wanna drive that antique?"

His fingers closed tightly around the scepter, but for another moment, he didn't move. Then, drawing in a deep breath, he let out a crow of inarticulate joy. With three bounds, he landed in the seat of the Royal Racer, jammed the scepter into place as the gearstick, and started the engine. It roared to life and he wrapped his fingers around the steering wheel. His eyes were gleaming with joy, and Taffyta realized, suddenly, that the ache in her cheeks was because she was grinning too.

Then he took off, the kart leaping into motion and streaking across the desert until he turned on a dime and came racing back, tracing figure eights on the dusty ground and sending up clouds of multi-colored sugar dust. His face was alight with fierce happiness.

Turning to Vanellope, Taffyta clasped her hands in front of her chest and said, "Thank you. _Thank you._ " Her voice came out sounding choked, but for once, the tears preventing her from saying anything else were happy ones. The Royal Racer caught her eye again, and she paused to watch it zoom by, a white blur of sparkle and dust.

Vanellope was twirling her goggles around her finger. "Yeah, sure, whatever. Hey, I saved this one for you as the _mildly_ more reasonable one between the two of you—there's one more condition. You guys don't get to just get let off the hook for being colossal dum-dums." Taffyta tore her eyes away from King Candy. Nothing Vanellope said could ruin this moment. "You're gonna be doing a little community service with Surge for the next few months," Vanellope said, sounding gleeful.

"Community service?" Taffyta asked doubtfully. "Like what?"

"Oh, I dunno, hopefully picking up dog doodie or something. I'm sure he's got something _really_ gross for the two of you."

At any other time, this probably would've upset Taffyta. But not now, not when her best friend finally—well, it was kind of melodramatic, but like, kind of had just gotten his soul back. "Okay," she said. "I guess that's fair enough." Vanellope nodded, and there was silence for a minute. Then, Taffyta said, "Can I ask you something, Vanellope?"

"Shoot."

Taffyta's eyes followed the Royal Racer. "Why are you letting him race again? After everything we did? Why?"

Vanellope shrugged. "Because I'm your benevolent ruler. And his too, unfortunately."

"You know, he's right about how none of the stuff you're saying is really part of a democracy."

"Pfft." Vanellope waved a dismissive hand.

Taffyta raised her eyebrows, unable to believe this. "Seriously? That's it? You were feeling nice? You haven't talked to me in like, three weeks!"

The other girl stuck her hands in her pockets. "Yeah. I mean, you _did_ deserve that."

"You said that already."

"And it's still true." Vanellope cocked her head. "If you really wanna know, I heard some gamers wondering about where he was. And then I started thinking, right? He must be _miserable_. And not just because he can't race now—because he's got his whole future, the whole rest of time, to not race." She stopped and looked at Taffyta. "That's where the whole me-being-a-benevolent-ruler thing comes in. I couldn't do that, not even to him." For a second, she watched King Candy, and then she turned back to Taffyta. "Look, we're never going to be _friends_ , me and him. But I think in some, like, creepy way, we kind of get each other. When you're a racer, you feel it in your code, and no matter how big of a jerk he is, he's still a racer."

For a long moment, Taffyta just stared at her. Then, a smile spreading across her face, she said, "I think you more than _kind_ of get him, Vanellope."

"Gross. Don't even say that. Kind of is all I can take."

Taffyta turned away, unable to keep the bright smile off her face. Then, she took a deep breath and turned back to the president. "Vanellope, I'm really sorry—"

But Vanellope waved a hand, and Taffyta stopped talking. "Yeah, yeah. I get it. Apology, apology, blah blah blah. Accepted. I think." She stuck her hands on her hips. "You know what the best apology would be, Taffyta? If you don't make me regret letting him race again."

"I won't," Taffyta said, clasping her hands again. "I won't. I know I'm not like, a model citizen, and neither is King Candy, but you'll see."

Vanellope laughed. "Sure, Taff." She snapped her goggles around her head. "And you're welcome. Now, since I _am_ your beloved president, do you mind doing me a favor?"

* * *

When King Candy stopped his kart in front of her, Taffyta couldn't help bouncing up and down on her heels. "We get to race together again!" she squealed.

He glitched fully to Turbo once, hopped out of the kart, and glitched back. Then, he looked around. "Speaking of…where'd your kart go?"

With a dismissive wave, she replied, "I let Vanellope take it back. She's going to leave it in the town square for me." On a normal day, well, really on _any_ other day, she never would have let Vanellope, or anyone else, drive her kart in a million years. But this definitely wasn't a normal day. Excitement got the better of her again and she jumped up and down a few times, a huge smile on her face while she clapped her hands. "Can you believe it, though? You get to be a racer again!"

His hand rested on the seat back for a moment as he stared at his kart. Then, he looked at her, his grin matching hers. "Guess that means you're ready to be out of contention for first place every three days."

"Ha, ha, very funny," she smirked. "You better get used to second place." He laughed, and for a minute, neither of them said anything, just reveling in the moment. This was…like, the most amazing thing ever. Okay, maybe not ever, probably the most amazing thing ever was the day that her and King Candy had become friends, or set themselves on the path to becoming friends. Gumdrops, what was it, thirteen years ago? It was incredible how far they'd come. This man had begun as her rival, then become her mentor, and then finally her friend, and she loved him fiercely. Seeing him happy was as good of a feeling as getting first place in a race. It may even have been better.

Hugging her arms around herself tightly, she said, "I can't wait for our first Random Roster Race. Do you think it will be tomorrow? Who do you think will get on the roster? I mean, both of _us_ , obviously, but I mean, who else, and—" Suddenly, a dark thought wormed its way into her head. "But…what if we were wrong? What if the gamers leaving had nothing to do with who was on the roster at all?" she said, twisting her fingers together. "What if they don't come back?"

King Candy took one last loving look at his kart, then turned to her. "They'll come back," he said.

She looked at him in surprise. Three months ago, when the virus she'd brought back from _Extreme EZ Living 2_ had almost destroyed the game, he'd said exactly the opposite. "Do you remember when you told me that there wasn't any point in having hope? And in being optimistic?"

Arching an eyebrow, he replied, "Oh, what, because I couldn't accept that gamers might get bored with _RoadBlasters_ and come back to _TurboTime_ , and if I was just patient, everything would eventually be fine?"

"Er…yeah," she said.

He cracked a small smile. "Well, here's the thing, Taffyta. It turns out—and I know you're really going to have trouble believing this—but listen, it turns out that once in awhile, I'm wrong about thingsth."

" _No_ ," she said in mock surprise, making him chuckle. Impulsively, she grabbed his hand and squeezed tightly. "So, don't tell Vanellope I said this. And I only mean it like, figuratively, but even if you're not _actually_ a king anymore, at least you're going to rule the racetrack again."

Squeezing her hand in return, King Candy grinned. "What do you say we take a spin around the Royal Raceway? You know, get some practice in—hoo-hoo, for you, obviously."

Taffyta smirked and replied, "Uh huh, not for _you_ , the guy who hasn't raced in six months?"

In answer, his grin just got wider, and he jumped into his kart. Taffyta clambered onto the back and held on as he took off across the desert. As her hair streamed out behind her, she closed her eyes and listened to the roar of the kart. The best life in the arcade, all right. She wouldn't trade it for anything.


End file.
